L- \, ^ fcibrarjD of trhe 'theological ^vmoxy PRINCETON • NEW JERSEY FROM THE LIBRARY OF THE REVEREND JESSE HALSEY, D.D. BX 7233 .H85 D4 Hunter, John, 1849-1917 De profundis clamavi DE PROFUNDIS CLAMAVI ^^ ^ DE PROFUNDIS CLAMAVl " Out of the depths have I cried unto Thee, O Lord. Lord, hear my voice. O Israel, hope in the Lord ; for with the Lord there is mercy, and with Him plenteous redemption." — Psalm cxxx. i, 2, 7, I. The Depths of Life The ancient maxim, " Self-knowledge is the beginning of all knowledge," has a nobler significance than that which it often bears. It is true, in the sense of St. Augustine's memorable words, " If thou sinkest deep enough into the human, thou wilt find the Divine." Not only around us, but within us, there is all the mystery and wonder of the universe. Mind and heart and soul are deeper than we know. They draw their life from infinite sources. Thomas Carlyle, whose " gospel " has been the inspiration of much of the best thinking and best striving of two generations, made a com.monplace of the fact that every great man is a miracle. But one need not be " great " in order to be a miracle. There I I 2 DE PROFUNDIS CLAMAVI is a Divine marvel in every common man. Our heroes and saints are not exceptional, but representative men. They reveal and interpret us to ourselves, disclose the depths of our being, the desires of our nature, and the possibilities of our life ; their greatness is a promise and a prophecy — the justification, not the condemnation, of our aspirations and hopes. Our human nature and human life have their depths, and not in anything are they less understood than in the depths which belong to them. Their superficial aspects are for ever hiding from us their deeper realities. What calls itself knowledge of men — acquaintance with their ordinary thoughts, passions, motives, and ways, with their various humours, caprices, follies, and weak- nesses — is not knowledge of man, of the inner and real man which the outer man as often conceals as reveals. We speak at times of " a shallow man." But is there any such man anywhere ? There are only too many men everywhere who are living on the surface of their nature, keenly alive to their earth-born wants and to the capacities of human existence for work and pleasure, and whose days are largely the record of mean ambitions and strivings. But to judge by appearances is nearly always misleading. The acutest judges of character are often at fault, and none go more frequently and lamentably astray in their reckoning than those who boast most confidently of their knowledge of men. In the so-called shallow man we may perceive, if we look DE PROFUNDIS CLAMAVI 3 intently and sympathetically enough, what is not shallow, and find, especially in those revealing hours when the tragic forces of existence sweep into his life, some sug- gestion of the latent power which needs the fiery storm to throw it up to the surface. We are often only pass- ing judgment upon ourselves, upon our want of thought, imagination, and insight, when we proclaim our fellows to be lacking in those elements to which the great and deep things of life make their appeal. In the circle in which we live and move there would be many rich discoveries for anyone with fine imaginative power, skilled to see into " The depths of human souls — Souls that appear to have no depth at all To careless eyes." There is a well-known poem by Matthew Arnold entitled "The Buried Life" — a poem full of haunting music and rare introspective power. It is a picture of many a soul, and it is not difficult to fill in from experience the outline which it supplies. We all have the power of living so completely upon the surface of our souls as to be ignorant of what is hidden in their depths. It is, indeed, a large part of the pathos and tragedy of life that we are so disobedient to the oracle which bids us know ourselves. We either do not care for self-knowledge, or imagine we have it in such abund- ance that we can swear by it at times — " as well as ] 4 DE PROFUNDIS CLAMAVI know myself ! " But there are moments when we have glimpses of what we are and may be, of hitherto unknown capacities and powers, and from beneath our conscious life there rise the murmuring voices of a deeper — a buried life. " Yet still from time to time, vague and forlorn, From the soul's subterranean depth upborne As from an infinitely distant land. Come airs, and floating echoes, and convey A melancholy into all our day : A bolt is shot back somew^here in our breast, And a lost pulse of feeling stirs again, The eye sinks inward, and the heart lies plain." It is, nevertheless, true that many people here and everywhere are living superficial and shallow lives. They have either not come to themselves, they are still crude undeveloped beings, to the great human powers and affections their vital progress has not yet advanced ; or they have fallen away from their true life after it had been once and well awake, and it is now deeply buried beneath passion and pride, concealed under the thick crust of a selfish and worldly nature. But in them all slumber the powers which make of the sons of men the sons of God, and the education of their being is the unforgetting care of Him from whom they come and to whom they go. In vain do they seek to escape from DE PROFUNDIS CLAMAVI 5 His discipline, and in vain do they seek peace other- where than in His will. In the natural movement of their days, and quietly as the night dawns upon a sleep- ing world, or swiftly and sharply in one of those " strong, rushing hours That do the work of tempests in their might," they will be awakened out of their vulgar ways of living, be made aware of the depths of their souls, and pass into a new world of experience and knowledge. St. Augustine complained of the people of his day : " No man cares to descend into himself." It is a com- plaint which some of our wisest teachers are repeating in our day. Few there be who care to go down to the depths, to have their self-complacency disturbed, and be made to feel deeply and think deeply. Most men have no inwardness. They live altogether in the out- ward. The brooding, meditative gift is not in them. In past times men suffered from excess of introspective thought, but the disease which is brought on by too much self -reflection is not in our day a widespread epidemic. Too much looking within is not a temp- tation of the modern man. There is no country less known to him than his own soul. " After years of life together," he might often confess, " my soul and I are strangers yet." He is afraid of deeper experiences, and reluctant to be on terms of close intimacy with himself. He is quite at home in the visible and tern- 6 DE PROFUNDIS CLAM AVI poral order of things, but he is a pilgrim and a stranger in what the Scottish seer called " the Eternities." From the message of the spiritual life he turns away as if it touched no secret spring in his heart. It is the voices without, not the voices within, to which he cares to listen. Even in religion, though interested, and perhaps keenly interested, in the problems of its external life, in its ecclesiastical and theological controversies, in its sectarian developments and in its social and philan- thropic activities, he is unmoved by its inward and spiritual power. It is often a sorrowful surprise to the earnest religious teacher to discover how slightly interested many professedly religious people are in religion, and what a trifling portion of their time they give to its serious study. Thorough, perhaps, in everything else, they are content to be superficial in all their knowledge of the verities upon which rest the world that now is and that which is to come. Hence their readiness to run after crazes and phantasies, and the little it costs them when brought into contact with aggressive unbelief to give up altogether their religious faith. They are carried away for the most part by scraps of knowledge which have come to them from newspapers, magazines, and popular novels. They have "outgrown" what they had never really grown into, and abandoned what they never truly possessed. There is a saying of Renan's which ought to be well pondered : " In reality, DE PROFUNDIS CLAMAVl 7 few persons have a right to be unbelievers." There can be little doubt that much of the fading interest in spiritual and eternal things which has marked the days that are passing over us, and much also of our scepticism and unbelief, are due to the want of inwardness, to the slight knowledge men in general have of the depths of their life, and to atrophy of the spiritual senses through neglect. There can be little doubt, also, that this neglect of the inner life is the explanation of the falling back of many in recent years upon traditional ecclesias- ticism — the reverting to a lower type of religion which we once supposed had been left behind. Men want a certain amount of assured religious belief, but they want it without any high and prolonged spiritual effort on their part. But as long as they remain strangers to their own souls and are content to let others feel, think, and believe for them, they must be more or less ignorant of the reality of religion. We are so made that we cannot believe with a real believing anything which does not answer in some measure to our consciousness and experience. The ultimate appeal of religion is to the soul. Outside of the soul, the surest and most convincing evidence of the realities of faith can never be found. The divinity within us must be awake to discern the divinity that descends out of heaven and is revealed in the world and life. Without the personal assurance which is the result of the actual satisfaction ot our spiritual needs and yearnings, we are not able to 8 DE PROFUNDIS CLAMAVI appreciate the great testimony to God and to the things of God borne by the religious experience of mankind — the collective experience which is named " authority " — a natural and genuine authority by which our spiritual life is enriched and we are freed from the limitation and narrowness of the mere individual standpoint. Also, we can never outside of the soul find the true and permanent ground and bond of religious sympathy and fellowship. On the surface we are divided, often to all appearance hopelessly divided, but in the depths we are one. Debate and argument, views and opinions, drive and keep us apart, but in the depths we find not only ourselves but our brethren — brethren breathing out the same aspirations and prayers, having the same passion for God, the same need of God, and the same joy in God. It is true of religion even in its intel- lectual aspect and expression, that those who are able to go beneath the surface and have the power of insight discover unities underlying apparently serious differ- ences, but this is still more true of religion as an experience. Spiritual experience — the experience of the life of God in the soul — is the highest liberalising influence, and the most effective and satisfying. It gives one the power to understand and interpret many religious dialects, and to discern here and now beneath diversities of temperament and training, cult and creed, the communion of saints, the universal Church of God — the Church of the Spirit. DE PROFUNDIS CLAMAVI 9 It seems to me what we most need to bestir our- selves about in these passing days is not so much the broadening as the deepening of rehgion, its deepening in our own souls and in the souls of our fellows. In its thoughts of God and His ways with man, religion has expanded wonderfully everywhere since the middle of the last century ; but religion must have depth as well as breadth. The breadth that does not proceed from depth is hardly worth having — it is certainly not worth crossing the Atlantic to recognise and honour. The intensive movement is more vital to progressive religion than any expansive or forward movement. The course of true religion is, indeed, most outward and onward when it is most inward. Great religious reformations ever date from the quickening and deepen- ing of faith in the souls of men. Their inspiration and energy are drawn from deeper depths than the merely argumentative and systematising powers of the mind. It is perhaps the most serious defect of the liberal movement in religion that it is so much more an intel- lectual than a spiritual movement. It is the constant approach to the things of God primarily through the intellect which sterilises much of liberal religion every- where, makes of the churches lecture halls rather than temples of the Spirit, and their pulpit a rabbinised pulpit for the exposition of philosophical ideas and doctrines rather than a place for the delivery of a message from God to man. We must go deeper. lo DE PROFUNDIS CLAMAVI Out of and to the depths of Hfe we must speak. Mere affinity of opinion and belief is far too outward and contracted to satisfy men who care much for universal religion, and hope and pray and work for the Universal Church. Our great facts, the things which in our hearts we all most regard, are in the depths, not on the surface. We are religious, not because the credentials of this or that form of religion bears the strain of critical inquiry and satisfies our critical reason, but because we have great moral and spiritual needs and experiences to which we believe our religion is a full and perfect counterpart, corresponding in a deep and manifold way with what we know of ourselves and of life. To the soul, then, we must return. Out of it have come religions, bibles, prayers, liturgies, psalms, hymns and spiritual songs, and it is still full of the elements of revelation. It is an unexhausted and inexhaustible world. The outward universe, the star-sown abysses of space, have none of those mysterious and unsearch- able depths which we find in our spiritual being. When we gaze on " The splendour of the morning sky. And all the stars in company. And think, How beautiful it is ! Our soul says, There is more than this," And there is more than this. God is, indeed, imma- nent in the world of nature and in the order of life, but DE PROFUNDIS CLAM AVI ii He is still more intimately present in the soul of man. Our spiritual being relates us immediately to the Infinite and Eternal Spirit, and it is this divine depth of root and resource which is the explanation of all our aspirations and the justification of the most daring hopes we can cherish of illimitable development. II. The Cry for God out of the Depths I. The cry for God is the natural utterance of the awakened soul of man in every land and age — the cry of man whenever and wherever he freely speaks out of the depths of his nature, an aspiration which all history confesses. It may not always be an intelligent or con- scious cry, but a seeker after God man has always been and must ever be, because from God he comes, begotten, not made, and with a nature so constituted that only in God can he find his full and final satisfaction and rest. The surface of his life may often appear to say one thing and its depths quite another thing, but it is the cry from the depths which reveals what he truly is and what he most needs. It is his inmost wants and desires, not his hard, cold sense and keen understanding, which read most rightly the secret of his life. It is not to the surface of his life his real spiritual needs belong, but only those poor selfish cravings which are often mistaken for them by ill-instructed minds. Outwardly he may seem to long and cry for other things more 12 DE PROFUNDIS CLAM AVI than for the presence of God, and to find his peace and joy in them ; but when his soul is moved and searched, and the fountains of its great deep are broken up, in all those crises which throw light on the inner condition and movement of his being, the cry for God is seen to be fundamental, and his longing to connect his life in some way with the life of the invisible and eternal world, an irrepressible longing, which tends ever to rise into a strong and intense passion. In the eighteenth century some clever men found an easy settlement of the religious problem by dismissing religion as the invention of priests, forgetting that it was the religious instincts and wants which made the priest and his institutions at all possible. Man is as distinctively a religious as he is a social being — religious for the same reason as he is domestic, political, intel- lectual, and artistic. It is his nature unfolding to divine realities and relations, seeking its corresponding objects and satisfactions. The beginnings of his religion, like the beginnings of all other things in his history, may be dim and vague and feeble, but it ought to be judged as we judge the other things, by its essential quality and most perfect expression, and not by its early and rude forms, not by the physical beginnings of spiritual instincts and the sense -conceptions and sense -language of primitive religious feelings. It is not independent of his mental and moral development, of his general condition and culture. It grows as he DE PROFUNDIS CLAM AVI 13 grows. It is not something grafted upon his nature from without but comes out of his nature — a com- ponent part of himself, which he must train and develop. Revelation is necessary to its purifying and perfecting, but revelation does not and cannot create the religious capacity or instinct. For a revelation to be received and understood there must be that in man to which it appeals — something in the depths of his personal being akin to what is in the infinite and unsearchable depths of God. Matthew Arnold used to say that religion, if it is to continue, must be based, not on traditions and documents, but on its natural truth ; and, of course, that is so, if by its natural truth we mean its corre- spondence with the fundamental facts of life and with the generalised experience of mankind. We need have no hesitation in affirming boldly its natural truth when we call to mind that there is nothing in the history of our race older and more universal, more central and commanding, than religion. Its many and various forms, the great historical religions and the older religions out of which they grew, all have their roots struck deep in human nature. Whenever and wherever man begins to reach the truly human level, he begins to worship, and the more human he becomes, the more do the sentiments of awe and reverence, dependence and submission, reinforced by the larger trusts which longer and wider experience give him, become natural to him. It is just because he is what he is that 14 DE PROFUNDTS CLAM AVI his spiritual attitude is that of a believer and wor- shipper ; and had he no other Bible than his own soul, he would never be without a living witness for God. In its wonder and awe, in its fear and hope, in its sense of goodness and truth and beauty, in its aspiration after perfection, in its shame because of failure, in its joy in obedience and service and sacrifice, and in all its idealising yearnings which never in these mortal years get their right and complete command over the life, he who watches and studies wisely and patiently will discover God, and from the sympathetic observation of all such experiences have the persuasion confirmed that religion is natural to man, and that the more of God man takes into his life the more natural he becomes. It would be easier to deny the tendency of matter to a common centre, or the tendency of man to draw to his fellows, than to deny the native tendency and movement of the human soul to God. Its only language may be a cry, but how full of meaning and prophecy is that cry ! — the cry of the soul for God as it comes to us down all the ages, from every people and from every literature which utters the mind of a people, and from the noblest spirits of every race inter- preting most clearly the voice of humanity as it speaks through them. " All men," said Homer, " cry after the gods." In " every nation," said St. Paul, " men seek after the Lord, if haply they may feel after Him and find Him." " The human soul," said Tertullian, DE PROFUNDIS CLAMAVI 15 " is naturally Christian. The testimonies of the soul [to God] are as true as they are simple, as simple as they are universal, as universal as they are natural, as natural as they are divine." " If we will but listen attentively," said Max Mtiller, " we can hear in all religions a groaning of the spirit, a struggle to utter the unutterable, a longing after the Infinite, a love of God." There is not, I am persuaded, even a touch of exaggeration in the statement that the greatest dis- covery of the nineteenth century was the discovery of the ancient religions, — of what men before Christ and before Moses, in a dim and far past and in countries like Egypt and India, thought about God and life. It has made us hear clearly, rising from every land and from every age, from men divided by leagues of space and centuries of time, ignorant and enlightened, mean and noble, the cry out of the depths of the soul for God, even the living God. Everywhere in our own age as well as in past ages may be heard the cry for God. It is the advanced spiritual desire of humanity. To-day, as yesterday, out of the depths of his soul man cries to God, how- ever much his noisy passions, follies and cares, and the tumult of the world, may make inaudible the voice of his deeper mind and deeper heart. It was once said by a celebrated English lawyer of our time that the man who could not get on without religion, who could 1 6 DE PROFUNDIS CLAM AVI not occupy his mind with love, friendship, business, politics, science, art, literature, and travel, must be a poor kind of creature. It is, on the contrary, the man who can be wholly satisfied with outward and earthly things apart from God who is the poor kind of creature, living upon the surface of his nature, with the energies of his spirit still dormant, or so suppressed and over- borne that they are in danger of dying out. To be truly a man is to have infinite capacity for God, to have desires, affections, and needs which the things of civilisation and culture cannot satisfy, which can only be satisfied in communion with the Divine. Man, be he what he may, is made to be a seeker after God ; and, because he cannot escape from himself, he cannot escape from God. The cry for God is heard as soon as he comes to himself, and it becomes clearer and more persistent, more passionate and pathetic, the further he goes into himself. In his more careless moods he may play with doubts, amuse himself with negative views and cheap rationalism, and treat religion as if it were merely something to be examined, pulled to pieces, and criticised ; but out of the depths of his unbelief the unconscious faith of the soul never fails to make itself heard. In spite of crowds of easy livers here and everywhere and the extraordinary supply of the means of excitement, which, giving vivid interest and attrac- tiveness to the outward life, tends to stupefy and deaden the religious sense, men cannot live utterly contented DE PROFUNDIS CLAM AVI 17 without God. The way they are caught now and again by all kinds of fanaticism proves that the promise and potency of religious faith are still there. It is also an impressive fact that behind all the surface play of the forces in modern life that tend to obscure or even to challenge and deny the fundamental religious beliefs, the religious nature of man may be seen asserting itself — and often in strange ways. The philosopher's bold statement that man becomes more and more religious is not without warrant. The religious affections may be changing, here and there, their objects and modes of expression ; but they are not losing their energy. The phenomena which are often regarded as signs and proofs of religious decay are more justly interpreted as religion passing through a process of transformation. There are movements of thought and feeling, far below the upper tides and disturbing agitations which we see and chronicle, that bear silent but strong witness to the upward-looking instincts and impulses of humanity. There is, as has often been pointed out, hardly a form of the deeper thinking and deeper living of our time which does not reveal the inherent and indestructible religiousness of man. The ideal substitutes for God upon which our more serious and cultivated unbelievers have been spending their devotion these many days prove how deep in the soul and unescapable are the religious instincts and needs. The cry for truth, for right, for justice, for love, is a cry for God. The 1 8 DE PROFUNDIS CLAMAVI moments in which men long and strive most purely and intensely for the triumph of truth and justice and love are moments of unconscious prayer — the prayer which includes in its sweep all our unselfish desires and yearnings and strivings. " All my springs are in thee," said the Hebrew psalmist. God is at the root of all our ethical aspirations and purely human enthusiasms, and to Him they lead. Without Him they remain partial and fragmentary ; only in Him do they find their centre and unity, their strength and stay. 2. And thus are we led to observe that the cry for God is the aspiration of the whole nature of man when he is true to it. It is not an isolated thing, the expres- sion of one faculty, a single experience ; it is in the structure and strain of our being, in its living unity of powers and tendencies and manifold needs. In all the faculties and affections of our complex nature we are created for God, and through them all we are meant to rise upward to Him. God is a demand of the intellect as well as a longing and need of the heart. Reason seeks God as much as any other of our nobler human powers, and in the fully and symmetrically developed man it is ever seen to be a faculty of reverence. Out of the depths of all true and earnest thought on the mystery of the world and life the quickened mind aspires to God, rises instinc- tively to the one supreme and universal Mind which the order of things bespeaks, and in which alone it can DE PROFUNDIS CLAMAVI 19 tind a satisfaction proper to its characteristic nature. Thought as it deepens confirms and justifies our own religious aspirations and trusts. You remember Shelley's line, " O thou Immortal Deity Whose throne is in the depth of human thought," and the philosopher's saying that, while a little know- ledge inclineth men to atheism, depth of knowledge brings them back to God. Because in mind as well as in heart and conscience man is kindred to God, the full development of the mind must lead at last to God, and God, we may be sure, has not so made the world that the honest and thorough study of it will lead men away from Himself. The complete witness of the human reason to God is yet to come, but God is its inevitable goal. The end of all deep thinking must be to put men more and more into the mood and attitude of worship. Much of the intellectual movement of our times may indicate instability and superficiality, but in its more serious forms it is the modern spirit dissatisfied with old and familiar explanations of the material and spiritual universe, yet seeking the innermost truth and reality of things, crying in its own way with the ancient Hebrew for God and confessing with the Christian saint that it is restless until it finds rest in Him who is the truth itself. And what has been said of deep thinking may be said of every form of deep feeling. It must render us 20 DE PROFUNDIS CLAMAVI religious, deep calling unto deep. The sense of beauty which makes poets and painters, and is more or less in all men, belongs to the image of God in man and is meant to put us in touch with the spiritual and eternal in all created things, and to raise us into communion with Him to whom St. Anselm prayed as the Absolute Beauty. Admiration, the power of perceiving, appre- ciating, and enjoying things lovely and great and wonderful, rises into adoration. Seas and skies and mountains, the dawn of day, a night of stars, kindle in the susceptible soul the sentiments of worship. The feeling which noble music produces is of the nature of aspiration ; it is a longing toward some divine good, consciously or unconsciously a longing toward Him who is the source and centre of all good and all harmony. It has been said of the highest kind of music that the hearing of it enables one to realise his immortality. It touches and awakens some inner sense which our common experience only partially satisfies ; it fills the mind with those great and high feelings and with those far-reaching thoughts that pass beyond all earthly bounds and wander through eternity. And the same is true of all the deeper parts and passions of our being. Our human affections at their best have their flower and fruit in spiritual and heavenly aspirations. Our human love of goodness stirs in us the divine love, and is included in it, and opens our nature to God as the sun opens the earth in spring. Our desire of excellence DE PROFUNDIS CLAM AVI 21 — excellence of character and excellence of work — bears witness to God and is a cry after His perfection. Our moral aims and strivings are fulfilled in religion. Our religion is the fulfilment of the deepest instincts, affections, needs, and experiences of our nature. As the fire seeks the sun and the river the ocean, so does our life in all its deeper and larger aspects move towards Him who is its beginning and its end. We must have God to understand and explain our own nature and life. He is the answer to all that is good and best in ourselves — to our powers of intellect, imagination, affection, conscience, to our faculties of worship, aspira- tion, and hope. " When I awake," said the Hebrew saint, " I shall be satisfied with God." " The life of man," said one of the fathers of the Christian Church, " is the vision of God." Out of the depths our souls, as they awake, cry for God ; and only with God can they be finally satisfied — only in communion with Him, spirit with spirit, can be found the fulness of life and joy. 3. The cry for God is an importunate cry in all the critical moments and experiences of life. What is true of the depths of our nature is true of the depths of our life as it is lived in the world. In its deep places, where we come face to face with its serious realities, we are taught what we truly are and are made aware of our divine relations and needs. Under the pressure of critical emergencies the most fundamental 22 DE PROFUNDIS CLAMAVl things in our life come to the surface. In our great and sore straits, if at no other time, the soul reveals its divine kinship and lifts its cry to God. It is true that our deep experiences are not all sorrowful. Joy may be as profound as grief, and out of the depths of joy every sound-hearted man breathes forth his gratitude, not merely for good achieved or found, but good received. In all its supreme moments life turns inevitably to God. In all our deep experiences God has a part, and almost in spite of ourselves we recognise it. But be glad and grateful as we may and ought to be for all that brightens and sweetens life, yet as things are now it is sorrow more than happiness that drives us to God. We have a nature endowed with infinite capaci- ties for pain, and there is no escape but an ignoble one from some form of the pain which makes the cross the true symbol of a large part of every man's life. " Per- haps to suffer," wrote the Swiss theologian, Vinet, in one of his letters, " is nothing else than to live deeply. Love and sorrow are the conditions of a profound life." A truer word was never spoken. The tragedy in which we live is meant to educate us. There would indeed be no understanding of life at all did we not know from experience that in life's depths we receive our best teaching and training. Out of the depths have come the finest poetry, the finest music, the finest speech of the world. " The Bible owes its place in literature," DE PROFUNDIS CLAMAVl 23 said Emerson, " not to miracles, but to the fact that it comes from a profounder depth of life than any other book." Out of the depths have come the most inspired and inspiring of the psalms of faith, both ancient and modern. Out of the depths men have brought blessings which are rarely found in green pastures and by still waters. We never know how much God is the one great need of the soul till we go down to the depths. There are depths of physical weakness and suffering out of which men cry to Him whose will concerning them they often forget in health and ease, and only remember when sickness comes in and shuts out the world. There are worldly anxieties and losses which rudely break up all the shallow optimism that has no deeper root than the self-complacency produced by prosperity, and which take men down below the surface of life into its deep places where they learn to pray, or to pray as they never prayed before. There is the sorrow of bereavement, common yet never commonplace, the pain that comes from broken fellowships ; and in their spiritual solitude and desola- tion men are driven to seek higher help and comfort than any which the world can give. There are experiences of fallibility in understanding what we ought to do ; critical hours in life when serious responsibilities press, and grave questions which mere 24 DE PROFUNDIS CLAMAVI acuteness cannot settle ; and men, in their extremity, feel the need of a wisdom which they do not find in themselves, and of a guidance which their fellows cannot give, and they cry unto God, " Lead me and teach me." There are depths of disappointment and failure in our best work, — sympathies imperfectly met, misplaced trusts, broken purposes, and defeated hopes ; and it is especially the ministry of failure even in the noblest things to draw forth the powers latent in every human being, and to make God felt as the one supreme neces- sity of life. There is the struggle with moral limitation and weakness, — the sensitive temperament, the ill-balance of a finely endowed mind, the want of will-power, the over-growth of impulses good in themselves, — inherit- ances which make life so tragic to many — the struggle with forces within and forces without which seem adverse to a noble development, and which make the most aspiring and faithful souls feel that they cannot do the things they would. The psalm from which our text is taken is familiar to many devout people as one of the seven penitential psalms. It was dear on this account to Chrysostom, Augustine, Savonarola, Luther, Hooker, Owen, Baxter, Wesley, and to many more of the elect spirits of our race. And it surely cannot be that any man capable of deep feeling can be wholly ignorant of the saddest tragedy of human life which is seen in the conflict between desire DE PROFUNDIS CLAMAVI 25 and duty, in the effort to reconcile the ideal and the actual, and to be at peace with God. Who does not know of this struggle, interpret it how he may ? Who has not cried out in the agony of it, O wretched man that I am, who shall deliver me ? When before the tribunal of his heart one passes in review the irrevocable years, what wonder if " Oft his cogitations sink as low As, through the abysses of a joyless heart, The heaviest plummet of despair can go." Though it is only one experience of the spiritual life and must not be allowed to overshadow all the rest, yet the sense of dissatisfaction, deepening into the sense of guilt, lies near the heart of all personal religion worthy of the name. It marks the awakening of the higher life ; it is the beginning of the upward movement. The worst conscience is not the one which is most sensitive to evil and most troubled by wrong things done and good things left undone, but the conscience which is so dull as to have no experience of guilty pangs and terrors, and which can make its possessor able to fit his greatest transgressions into a self-satisfied view and scheme of life, and to reconcile himself to memories of passion and shame. In men morally healthy and well developed the sense of sin, of evil done with full consent of the will, is a reality, not a shallow emotion ; it is a profound grief, the thought, not of their weaker 26 DE PROFUNDIS CLAMAVl moments, but of their sanest hours. It Is simply self- knowledge. It is a universal law of the higher life that the better a man becomes the more sensitive he is to sin, and not only to his own sin, but to the sins of his fellows, the sins of the nation, of society, of the church, of the community in which he lives. It is the best men who feel most keenly the burden of human iniquity and confess the abounding moral evil of the world as if it were their own evil ; it is they who are most con- scious of the wrongdoing of their fellows and suffer most on account of it, and not the actual wrongdoers themselves. It was so with the Hebrew poet. The pathos of the great lovers and helpers of mankind is in his psalm. It is the utterance of an intensely personal emotion, but it is more than personal. He speaks in the name of Israel, merging his own feeling in the shame and repentance of his people. " I wish," said that great prophet and saint of God, Frederick Denison Maurice, " to confess the sins of my land and time as my own." It is almost impossible to imagine a truly godly life without this underlying sensitiveness and sadness, without this suffering heart of holy love and sympathy which is the thing likest God in this world. In ancient India, perhaps more than fifteen hundred years before our psalm was written, men sung a hymn which obviously came out of the same experience as DE PROFUNDIS CLAMAVl 27 this passionate Hebrew poem of penitence and prayer. It was translated out of the dead Sanscrit tongue by Prof. Max Muller. These are the English words : — Let me not yet, O my God, enter into the house of clay : Have mercy, Almighty, have mercy. If I go trembling like a cloud driven by the wrind : Have mercy. Almighty, have mercy. Through want of strength, thou strong and bright God, have I gone wrong : Have mercy. Almighty, have mercy. Wherever we men, O God, commit an offence before the heavenly host : Wherever we break the law through thoughtlessness : Have mercy, Almighty, have mercy. III. The Divine Answer to the Cry out of THE Depths Is there any divine response to the call of humanity for God, to these many and varied cries out of the depths of our human being and life ? There must be in the nature of things, we are persuaded, such a response, something outside of man answering to his inner life and fulfilling its needs, actual movement and manifestation on the part of God corresponding to our natural cravings after Him. Out of the depths man cries, down to the depths God must come, meeting with a corresponding answer every real want of the souls He has made to seek after Him, if haply they may 28 DE PROFUNDIS CLAMAVI feel after Him and find Him. Whatever may be the relations between human aspiration and divine con- descension, whatever be the conditions of the coming down of the heavenly help to human need, it is simply impossible for any religious soul to think that there is no approach of God to man. Unless life be a tremendous unreality and illusion, and we come into the world only to be fooled and cheated ; unless the universe departs from its order in dealing with the spiritual necessities of mankind and the cry for God meets with exceptional treatment, quite unlike that given to the other functions and attitudes of our nature — it is simply inconceivable that the fundamental cravings of the soul can exist without their satisfaction, and the prayer from the depths remain unanswered. Many of our religious teachers may say too much on this matter and speak presumptu- ously of what God has done and can do, but their over- statements to those who are living in the consciousness and communion of God are better and nearer the truth than denials and negations. It is, indeed, not difficult to believe in divine condescension, in an answering, revealing, redeeming God, when one truly believes in God — believes, that is, in infinite and eternal goodness. It appears inevitable that man should look with longing and hope for help from on high, — for he cannot under- stand his life, its whence and why and whither, apart from God. It cannot be, he is sure, that having no choice of existence, he should be here in this world DE PROFUNDIS CLAMAVI 29 endowed with a mysterious nature, called to live a life full of most serious significance, without the presence and help of God. He has a right, he feels, to trust Him from whom he comes, and to believe that no light from heaven can lead astray, least of all those great religious aspirations and wants which have lived through all human ages, over-reaching all stretches of history, and are still the highest necessities of the soul. No strong crying and tears will make God answer our selfish or fictitious wants ; but that He is responsive to what is best in man, that He is answering day after day, age after age, the spiritual aspirations and needs of humanity, is a necessary belief to everyone. Christian or non-Christian, who admits the reality and closeness of the bond between God and man, and the affinity of man for that life in God which is the true end of his being. " O Israel, hope in the Lord ; for with the Lord there is mercy and plenteous redemption." " He is mindful of His own : He remembers His children." The movement cannot be all on the side of man. Job had caught a glimpse of an eternal truth of life when he rested his hope of vindication and deliverance upon the desire which his Maker had toward the work of His hands. That the desire of God has brooded over humanity from the beginning, and still broods over the life of the children of men, is a thought which holds a central place in the literature of religion ; and however difficult it may be to reconcile this lovely, human way 30 DE PROFUNDIS CLAMAVI of thinking of God with our abstract conceptions of Deity, it brings us closer, we feel sure, to the divine reality of things than ways which we may fancy to be grander and more philosophical. We are fond of con- trasting the littleness of man and the awful brevity of his days upon this earth with the immeasurable creation which science reveals ; but if God be love, then our passionate human life must be more to Him than a whole universe of passionless worlds. What answer can masses of clay and stone, however huge and old, give to the desire of His heart ? Can we frame any worthy thought of God which excludes the idea of His longing for the love and trust and obedience of His children ? If the word " Father " spells but one syllable of the Divine name, then we may speak not only of man's need of God, but reverently of God's need of man — of divine love that seeks the answering love of its sons and daughters, of Deity ever going forth out of the abysmal depths of His perfection to give Himself to His creation and His children because it is His nature and property so to do. It is told of Pascal that often he seemed to hear God saying to him, " Thou couldst not seek Me had I not already found thee." Yes ! we seek God because He has first sought and found us. The cry out of the depths is more, therefore, than a mere human breath- ing — it is itself a divine inspiration. Our pure unselfish longings for truth and goodness, our prayers for union DE PROFUNDIS CLAM AVI 31 with God, are, as St. Paul taught long ago, the Spirit making intercession for us, — that highest human voice which is ever one with the Divine voice, which is the Divine voice rising from the depths of our humanity and speaking through our spiritual needs. In the movements of the human spirit we see the workings of the Divine spirit. It is the Divine love of goodness that cries out in us when conscience bears witness for good. It is the Divine hatred of evil that cries out in us when conscience awakes in protest against evil. It is because we are made in the moral image of God and are united to Him, not by baptism or conversion, but by creation, that our whole nature thrills with what moves the Divine nature. In its last analysis there can be no noble aspiration in man which is not an impulse from Him in whom we live and move and have our being. In the realm of our inner life God does not begin His work where we leave off. It is not man down here and God up there, with a vast stretch of distance between. In all the experiences of our life and growth He is present, mingling His life with ours, silently and potently. Not here and there, not now and then, but always and everywhere He is near, acting upon the human spirit from within as well as from without, immediately as well as mediately, speak- ing down to and up from the depths of the heart and conscience — deep answering to deep. We interpret, and rightly interpret, the various 32 DE PROFUNDIS CLAMAVI religions of mankind as man seeking God ; but they may also be regarded, and rightly regarded, as God seeking man. " Unaided reason," men have been in the way of exclaiming, as they contemplated the various religious systems of the world outside the Hebrew and the Christian religions. But we may well ask, with Cardinal Newman, whether the reason of man is ever unaided .'* There are not two kinds of religion — natural and revealed. From the point of view of human capacity and seeking and effort all religion is natural : from the point of view of divine manifesta- tion all religion is revealed. The Logos doctrine of the Fourth Gospel, whatever else it teaches, teaches the divine activity in our world from the beginning. It would be an error to suppose that God neglected the larger part of mankind because of His more intimate dealings with one section of the human race. It must be true, if God be one and His name one, that men of like passions and needs as ourselves, who come from God and belong to God, and are nourished physically by His air and sunshine and fruits of the earth, must also have provision made in the divine order of things for the sustenance of their spiritual life, and that it is not left entirely to the tender mercies of their fellows whether they shall have God or be without God in the world. It must be true that God cares equally for the souls of all His children, and that He finds access to them, helps them, teaches them, com- DE PROFUNDIS CLAMAVI 33 forts them, saves them, by methods and means that are not seen and temporal, and by ways in which no man can tell whence He cometh and whither He goeth ; and that He is only limited in the giving of Himself to them by their capacity to respond and receive. People of old used to think that the Divine action was confined to here and there, now and then ; but the conviction is growing and spreading that the only defensible conception of the moral action of God on humanity is that of a continuous and impartial influence limited to no age or race. To our enlightened feeling it is becoming more and more presumptuous to say that His spirit can only work along one line of human thought, or can only bring men to Himself through one set of defined successions of emotion or experience. Personal intimacy with God is not an experience special to Jews or Christians. The knowledge of the revela- tion of God in Hebrew and Christian history is an unspeakable blessing, but those whom, in the order of Providence, it never reaches, are not thereby excluded from the communion of the spirit. A truer and larger faith in God as the everlasting Father and Teacher and Saviour of mankind has made it no longer possible for intelligent and believing men to regard all religions outside the Jewish and Christian pale as superstition and falsehood, or to keep up the old pitying and con- descending attitude towards them. Their immaturities and corruptions we no longer allow to cheat us of the 3 34 DE PROFUNDIS CLAMAVI right to say : God is good to all ; whither shall we go from His Spirit ? He has never left Himself without a witness, never left multitudes of His creatures without His help, without light and guidance, without comfort and salvation. " The Unseen Power, whose eye For ever doth accompany mankind. Hath look'd on no religion scornfully That man did ever find. " Which has not taught weak wills how much they can ? Which has not fallen on the dry heart like rain ? Which has not cried to sunk, self-weary man : TJwu must be horn again I " The deep needs of the soul which make man look longingly for help from above and beyond himself, even from God, may be interpreted as a cry for knowledge of Him with whom he has to do, a cry for reconciliation or union with Him, a cry for light and guidance, a cry for strength and consolation and peace. The divine response to this vast and varied cry of humanity has been made, we believe, though in varying degrees, to the whole race of mankind. " Tell me, I pray Thee, Thy name," is a cry out of the depths which man has raised to God in. every land and age. It is as natural as it is vital. To know the character of the Unseen Power that orders our birth and death and all our life, and what His relation and DE PROFUNDIS CLAMAVI 35 attitude are to those whom He made to seek after Him, is a craving which every human being exercising normal powers must at times feel and express. And in some way and some measure God has been answer- ing this cry, been revealing Himself to man through all the ages of man's life here upon this earth. Reve- lation has been slow and gradual, not because of any Divine reluctance or caprice, but because it waits upon human development, upon the quickening and unfolding of man's highest powers. In troubled and bewildered hours man has been heard complaining, " Verily Thou art a God that hidest Thyself " ; and yet the light has ever come as fast as he could bear it and receive it. There is no want of revelation. There is, indeed, nothing but revelation. From the beginning God has been revealing Himself to men by the order and beauty and bounty of the world, through the natural affections, by the teaching and discipline of life and the education of history. Knowledge of nature and man is knowledge of God. In finding order, harmony, bounty, beauty, truth, wisdom, justice, good- ness, and love, God is found. It is all revelation — from nature to man and from man to highest man. God has ever been actively present in the world, and espe- cially in man and in the upward movements of his intellectual and moral life. We dare not pretend to limit the ways by which He makes known His per- sonality and His presence, and moves, illuminates, and 36 DE PROFUNDIS CLAMAVI guides His children. He draws nigh to them, not only in and through His creation and the course of history, not only through the teaching and example of His great prophets, holy servants, and beloved sons, but immediately — mind with mind, spirit with spirit. In all ages men have had experience of an immediate presence — of a God who has access to their inmost being and acts in their secret life, who reveals Himself by impressions upon their spirits, and whose voice, when they are hushed to listen, is heard, not in their ears, but in their souls. Yes ! God is ever coming down into our life — coming more and more. His Advent is unceasing ; new light from the Eternal source of light is ever flow- ing into human souls. What is needed is not more activity of manifestation on the part of God, but more susceptibility to the Divine manifestation on our part — souls which we take pains with for the sake of the unseen and spiritual, and try to make sensitive to God. The cry of our humanity for reconciliation and union with God is also a cry which God is ever answering. The great obstacle to religion in our world is not ignorance, but sin. More than enlightenment, we need salvation. Can all our civilisation minister to a troubled conscience ^ Can all our culture heal a guilty pang .'* Can the knowledge of any scientific, philoso- phical, or theological truth subdue an evil passion ? But in the depths of our weakness and sin God is our DE PROFUNDIS CLAMAVI 37 salvation. The deliverance of man is dear to God. It is the essential nature of love to seek and to save. Because God is love He is ever coming down to the depths of our life, depths of sorrow and sin, the deepest depths of degradation, in order to help and to bring to Himself by all the power of His love His wayward and disobedient children. Whether it be a fallen or a rising world we live in, we know in our hearts that we need reconciliation with the God of the world. Blessed be His eternal love ! He has never been outside His world, but has been always in it, bearing the sins and carrying the sorrows of our race. Its history is the history of redemption, the history of the unceasing efforts of Him with whom we have to do, to influence without compelling the vagrant and stubborn wills of men. Through all the human ages, ever since sin began to darken the face of the world, the seeking and saving love of God has been a reality. All the great attitudes and acts of God are eternal. " That which was from the beginning declare we unto you." " His goings forth have been of old and from everlasting." He was in Christ reconciling the world unto Himself, but Christ did not commence the Divine ministry of reconciliation, nor did He exhaust or end it. The work of Christ is based on the deeper and larger fact of the love and mercy and care of the Eternal toward all mankind. We are learning its deepest lesson when we see in it a picture of what God 38 DE PROFUNDIS CLAMAVI is always doing : always helping His children, always saving them in His infinite goodness and mercy. And as it was then, it is now and ever shall be, world without end. And not only through Christ, and men inspired with the spirit of His life and the charity of His Cross, does God reconcile the world to Himself ; but the whole constitution and course of things are so ordered as to bring men at every point into contact with God as the God of salvation. The supernatural works everywhere through the natural, the Divine through the human. Unto Nature and unto all the forces which enter into human life have been committed the ministry of recon- ciliation. One God worketh through all and towards the same good and gracious ends. There is no weak compassion in Nature, but there is no want of mercy and tenderness and grace. Its laws so perfect convert the soul, and its severity as related to man is part and means of his discipline and education. The external conditions and incidents of life are all providential, and however they may be produced, God deals with us through them, moving us to forsake sin, and to find in His order and will our peace. And not only without but within his life does God work on man, stirring his soul, inclining and strengthen- ing him to follow the good, yet with no sense to him of constraint, but only of quickening and co-operation. We seek God because He first seeks us. And the DE PROFUNDIS CLAMAVI 39 meeting-place is often in the lowest depths, where we are struggling with weakness and sin, or are sinking under them. At the point where sin leaves us in the darkness of shame and despair God in His mercy finds us, and is nigh to help and save. The most central truth of our religion is just the helpfulness, the universal and eternal helpfulness, of God. This is the heart of the religion of the Hebrew poets and prophets. " O Israel, thou hast destroyed thyself, but in JVIe is thy help." " In God is my sal- vation and my glory ; the rock of my strength and my refuge is in God." This, also, when we put aside all those strange accretions which have gathered about it in its passage through the thoughts of men, is the message of Jesus Christ, to whom God was the Eternal Shepherd of souls, who seeks until He finds. It is the message which the Church has been repeating age after age, clearly or faintly, in differing and often confusing phrase : God is with us — with us in the deepest depths, with us in bur greatest humiliations, with us in our bitterest shames, with us in our terriblest sorrows, with us to forgive and save, to strengthen and comfort. It is the glory of Jesus Christ that to-day, as yesterday, He inspires men who come directly under His influence with this enthusiasm of faith in the redeeming mercy and love of the Eternal. To those of us who have been born in Christendom the hope of the old Hebrew saint in plenteous mercy and redemption, in infinite 40 DE PROFUNDIS CLAMAVI resources of saving love and power in the Divine nature, is ours in yet greater fulness. The gospel of Him who sounded the depths of human sorrow and sin, who descended to hell in another and truer sense than is meant in the Creed, who went down into the depths of the world's evil and felt its power — His gospel is a gospel of hope. What is emphatically His secret is the new and greater trust and hope in God which He implanted in the minds and hearts of men. His most central thought concerning human suffering is that it is joy in the making. His most central thought concerning abounding sin is more abounding grace — infinite possibilities of moral recovery and repair. Men and women ! haunted and persecuted by sleepless memories of passion and failure and shame, you have no right to despair of yourselves, for. that is to doubt God. His love is deeper than all the depths of moral evil into which you can sink. The hope of salvation to the uttermost has ever come to men through the experience of real and intimate fellowship with God. In all lands and ages the men who have stood nearest God have believed most grandly in His infinite charity and grace. Through Him who said that He was one with the Father has been preached unto the world the forgiveness of sins. Because God is love, holy and inexorable love. He must be for ever and ever a God who forgiveth sin — the infinite giver of a power that makes men better, filling them with new tempers. DE PROFUNDIS CLAMAVI 41 new affections, new loyalties, through which the weak become strong and the bad good — the infinite giver of a power which takes away sin in the only sense sin can ever be taken away, by making the sinner hate his sin, turn against it and away from it, and love and follow the good. In recent days we have heard much, perhaps too much, of " Old Theology " and " New Theology." What is described as the Old Theology made much of the sense of sin and the need of forgiveness. It regarded human nature chiefly under the aspect of sinfulness and guilt. It forgot that human nature is not a simple and single thing, and that a gospel to commend itself to all men must be wide as human need. Its marvellous strength in the days when it was heartily accepted and believed grew out of its lirnitations, but these also were the cause of its weakness and its decay. It provoked a reaction from which we are at present suffering. Our liberal theology is too often just as partial and one-sided, failing to meet the needs with which the old orthodox presentation of religion chiefly dealt. A well-meaning religious teacher was speaking on the beauty of goodness to a gathering of poor people in the slums of a great city. " Your rope isn't long enough for the likes of us," shouted one of his hearers. Now, it is not wisdom to think that we have touched bottom because our plummet has ceased going down. It may only mean that the soul and life are too deep for our sound- 42 DE PROFUNDIS CLAMAVI ings. What is described as " New Theology " must have much of the Old Theology in it to enrich and complete it, if it is to satisfy in any real and abiding way the spiritual needs of men. Sin and forgiveness, reconciliation and union with God, must not hold in it a secondary place. Its preachers must have the historic sense, and come not to destroy but to fulfil. The thought of the immanent God which has become so real and vivid in our time that it seems to many like a new revelation, does not, wisely understood, lessen our faith in the ever -revealing and ever -redeeming God. But it is required of religious teachers who would meet the deepest cravings of humanity, not only to believe in the Divine Immanence, but to have personal experience of God's present help and salvation. St. Augustine tells us that his chief reason for writing his imperishable confessions was to praise God before men for raising him from such depths of sin, " lest any other might lie down and sleep in despair and say, ' I cannot awake.' " It is still preachers who can tell men from their own experience of the love and mercy and grace of God, whom our world most needs. Of all men, the preacher must not be weak in faith ; he must be no doubter, no cynic, no pessimist. He must be a great believer in the great things, an unconquerable optimist, a man of abounding hopefulness ; for he lives to inspire and diffuse hope, to make men feel and believe that they live in a world, not under God's wrath and curse, DE PROFUNDIS CLAMAVI 43 but under His love and blessing, and that neither life nor death, nor things present nor things to come, will be able to separate them from the Eternal charity and care. When the saintly Quaker, John Woolman, lay on his deathbed, the feeling, he said, " of the extent of the sin and misery of my fellow-creatures separated me from the Divine Harmony, and was more than I could bear. But in the depths of my distress I remembered that Thou, O Lord, art omnipotent, and that I had called Thee Father ; and again I was made quiet in Thy will and looked for deliverance from Thee ! " To God we must ever look when there is darkness without and within. We must not let the sorrow and sin of the world rob us of our faith and hope. There can be no such thing as unchanging and persistent evil in the world. For God is never outside of the world. He is ever indwelling and at work in His moral as in His physical creation, and present in all shapes and depths of evil as the infinite spirit of goodness work- ing for goodness, the everlasting Father and Saviour of men. " O Israel, hope in the Lord; for with the Lord there is mercy, and with Him plenteous redemption." \^.M^it^U\M I Ji/vu/a^ «?c. ^ y^f^. [^17 WHAT MUST I DO TO BE SAVED ? " Sirs, what must I do to be saved ? And they said, Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved, and thy house." — Acts xvi. 30. The question, " What must I do to be saved ? " is a common question, yet it is never commonplace. In some shape it is upon almost every lip. It is one of those great human questions which men ask age after age, and ask as if they had never been asked before. It is new to every man because it is vital to every man. Our deepest needs know neither to-day nor yesterday. They are always and everywhere the same. It is a question which is full of interest to every serious man, and to every man in his serious moods. Our moral and spiritual needs are as real and sometimes as pressing as our physical necessities. They are not always felt — they are the needs of our deeper heart and deeper mind ; but in our truer and better moments, and in all those experiences which greatly move and search us, we know and confess them to be real and supreme. It is from the depths of life, and not from its surface, 44 WHAT MUST 1 DO TO BE SAVED ? 45 that the cry comes, " What must I do to be saved ? " — that is, when it is a genuine cry ; the cry not of awakened self-love but of awakened godliness ; a cry for deliverance from sin, and not simply a clamour to escape from the punishment which sin inevitably brings in this and in all the worlds. The sense of sin is a reality, a genuine human experience which will not be ignored, and which no reasoning can reason away. Instead of being, as we have been told, " a remnant of savagery and bar- barism," sure to vanish with the triumph of intelligence, it is, on the contrary, the sign of all signs of an onward moving being, of a progressive moral nature ; it grows with man's growing power of moral sympathy and insight, and will never leave him so long as he is able to see himself better than he is and vision is beyond achievement. Our grief for sin is really our grandeur in disguise, the inverted image of our greatness, the shadow cast by aspiration, the feeling awakened in one who has heard the call to a more perfect life which he knows he can obey. There may be certain things in human life which are well accounted for on the supposition of an animal nature slowly fading and dying out of man, but with every new advance in knowledge, with every new and larger perception of the moral ideal, with every new accession of spiritual light, new forms and opportunities of sin come within the range of vision and possibility. The sins which our Lord said are most deadly are not 46 DE PROFUNDIS CLAMAVI physical, but spiritual in their origin and quality — the perversion and corruption of the higher nature. We may have no theory compelling us to speak of ourselves as totally depraved and with " no health in us," for God, that is good, is ever immanent in His creation and in His children, and if we make our bed in hell, behold He is there ; but we know the burden of sin. In our deeper moments and moods the temper of moral content is strange to us, and sin — the wilful choice of evil instead of good, with all the weakness and degradation which follow from that choice — comes home to us, as a fact, not a fiction ; a reality, not a make-believe. We know in our heart of hearts that we have done that which we cannot justify ; that we have not lived up to our light ; that we have failed to realise the good which we were free and able to realise and to which we were drawn by a secret obligation and reverence ; we know that under the pressure of voluntary inclination we have again and again yielded ourselves captive to evil. In these revealing moments, we cover our faces because we can hide our transgres- sions no more. The conviction of sin, where it is genuine, is due, not to fear of consequences, but to moral illumination. It is the thought of our wise, not of our foolish hours ; of our strong, not of our weak moments. The terrible cry of Paul, "What I would I do not : what I hate I do," must be the sum and expression of the musings WHAT MUST I DO TO BE SAVED ? 47 of every thoughtful man. Like the French king, we must each know the two men of that great tragedy of conscience. There is much of the sinner in the saint, as there is much of the saint in the sinner, and it is only the holiest saint who knows how near he is to the worst sinner. Whoever is self-satisfied is easily satis- fied. The better we become the less self-complacent are we. It is the best men seeking the best who are most troubled by the memory of past failure, and most conscious of present shortcoming. The only man who uttered no regrets, betrayed no sense of failure, was conscious of no shortcoming, was oppressed by no unfulfilled ideals or purposes, acknowledged no sin, was He whom His disciples confessed to be " the Christ, the Son of the living God." It is one of the supreme characteristics of the Christian revelation that it quickens and deepens in man the sense of sin. Jesus Christ comes not to judge and condemn, yet His Holy Presence in our human life is itself judgment and condemnation ; at once the glory and the shame of our humanity. The revelation of the more perfect always convicts of shortcoming and failure. The law enters and sin abounds. As we stand face to face with Jesus Christ, and His eyes search us through and through, we are touched as never before with the sense of sin ; the greater light reveals the greater darkness ; our self- delusions and self-complacencies vanish j we remember 48 DE PROFUNDIS CLAMAVl our omissions of duty as well as our positive transgres- sions ; we pierce beneath our actions to our motives and affections, and that one word of human experience which we miss in the prayers of Christ falls from our lips — " I have sinned." The reality of sin is increasingly felt as we perceive and realise its consequences ; how it weakens and deadens those faculties and affections which make us the spiritual children of God ; how it wounds and kills the fine humanities of our nature, and darkens and disorders human life and human society. Sin is personal, but it is more than personal in its conse- quences. By the disobedience of one, many are made sinners. By our folly and weakness and wickedness every man of us helps to make the race fall and to keep it fallen. The mystery which men make of the world's moral condition comes back upon us as the mystery of individual unfaithfulness and transgression. The sense of sin is a painful burden, but is a blessed burden after all ; a sign not of death but of life ; not of falling but of rising. To be weak and wicked is bad, but not to know it and feel it is worse — the worst doom of a careless, sin-loving heart. Remorse, I often say, is not the deepest hell : the deepest hell is that in which there is no remorse — the painless hell — where the gnawing worm is dead and the scorching fires are quenched. The final result of the disregard of moral law is not suffering — conscious suffering, that is — but WHAT MUST I DO TO BE SAVED ? 49 incapacity to suffer. Not to any fixed or finished con- dition of evil does suffering belong, but to the conflict between good and evil, to the struggle between life and death. It is the painless hell, I say, that is the worst hell, and there are thousands of men and women around us who are, as far as we can judge, in this hell at this moment — men who are bad and are content to be bad ; whose self-indulgences and dishonesties, hatreds and cruelties, never give them a sleepless night ; women whose habitual indifference to all highest and best things never brings the tinge of shame to the cheek. Let us thank God if we are not so far gone in a selfish and worldly life as to be insensible to our moral condition ; let us thank God if our sin is finding us out in torment- ing memories that will not let us sleep ; in unquench- able fires of regret and shame. In such pain there is hope ; in such shame there is the power of God unto salvation ; such a sense of sin is the beginning of all redemption and all progress. I. The work of Christian teaching never comes nearer to its chief object than when it seeks, as I do now, to answer the question which every one of us must at some time have asked with real concern — " What must I do to be saved ? " And first of all, let it be clearly understood what it means to be saved. Any concep- tion of salvation that is based on a partial or false view of life must necessarily lead to practical error, or to the loss of healthy practical influence. It is a practical 4 so DE PROFUNDIS CLAMAVl question and a pressing one. It has been interpreted again and again as merely a cry of deliverance from imaginary and other world terrors, the expression of the coward's trembling anxiety to save his own skin — to sneak out of punishment rather than to back out of wrongdoing. But it is infinitely more than this ; it is founded upon unquestionable facts and tremendous realities of human experience. It has also been mixed up with some strange errors, and with that strangest of all errors, that it is not only from sin, but from God we require to be saved. Let me ask you in God's good name to dismiss all such selfish anxieties and fears. No one can harm man save himself. Outside of himself there is nought in the universe that will destroy or hurt him. Himself right, then everything is friendly to him. Himself wrong, then punishment is the kindest and best thing for him. There is no revenge in the Divine order of the universe. The justice of God as well as His mercy seeks our salvation. The law of the Lord is perfect, converting the soul, and our Judge is also our Saviour. Like all the great words of religion, the word " salva- tion " has got its true meaning much dimmed and narrowed. It needs to be constantly illuminated and enlarged by connecting it with the Biblical and Chris- tian idea of salvation. Both in the Old and New Testament it is the symbol of a great and infinite idea. The objection to many definitions of it is that they are WHAT MUST I DO TO BE SAVED ? 51 altogether inadequate — that they only express a very small part of the meaning which the prophets and apostles of religion saw in it. The salvation of Jesus Christ is indeed a great salvation — far greater than most men have ever thought or imagined. It meant and it means a large and many-sided experience ; the highest quality and order of human life, the highest character and blessedness which men individually and collectively are capable of reaching and realising. I. Salvation is first a certain deliverance from the depression and dismay which spring from our knowledge and fear of the evil we have done ; it is a certain relief from the shame which paralyses hopeful endeavour, and from the ignorant and guilty dread which makes the thought of God a burden and not an inspiration. The suffering of an awakened conscience is of all burdens the hardest to be borne. This was the Nemesis that the ancients pictured as ever pursuing the ever-flying and never-escaping criminal. This was the torment that drove Lady Macbeth mad — who, with all her ablutions, could not wash out the bloodstains from her hand. And it is the sorrow not only of those who have committed great crimes against humanity, but of every man who is haunted by lost opportunities, of every man who has fled from duties that demanded faithful- ness unto death, of every man who has given his soul away in exchange for some worldly prize, of every man 52 DE PROFUNDIS CLAMAVI who has not lived up to his light, and has not been obedient to the heavenly vision when obedience was inconvenient and hard ; of every man awakened to the sense of the irrevocable past and to the thought of what he might have been and might have done. We are commonly told, 1 know, that the conscientious man is a happy man, contented and satisfied with himself, but this theory is not in accord with facts. It is your most conscientious man who is most dissatisfied with himself and most keenly alive to shortcoming and failure. " Happiness of an approving conscience ! " exclaims Carlyle in a well-known passage in Sartor Resartus — " did not Paul of Tarsus call himself the chief of sinners and Nero of Rome, jocund in spirit, spend much of his time in fiddling ^ " But the sense of sin is not healthy in its influence when it fails to receive any hopeful interpretation ; when it breeds morbid and despairing thoughts of ourselves and God, of life here and hereafter. It is not good to live in an atmosphere of self-reproach, self-distrust, and fear. Despair is fatal to all high and sustained endeavour. We are saved by hope. 2. Salvation means, then, in the first place, a certain deliverance from the depression and fear of sin, it means a sense of the forgiving mercy and help of God, it means the victory of faith and hope ; but all this is only clearing the ground for the great salvation of Jesus Christ. The removal of tormenting shame, of our WHAT MUST I DO TO BE SAVED ? 53 ignorant and guilty dread of God and fate, is only the first step in the way of the Christian salvation. There is evil in the heart and life, and from its presence and dominion we require to be delivered. The cry, " What must I do to be saved ? " when a true cry, is a longing for deliverance from sin, and not, as I have said, a clamour to escape from the punishment which sin inevitably brings in this world and in all the worlds. We are not in real contact with the Divine order of the world until we feel that it is not penalty here or hereafter God wants to save us from — but sin. We bear and must bear the punishment of our sins. The remission of sin is not the remission of punishment. We reap what we sow. It is by this severity of disci- pline God makes us see the exceeding sinfulness of sin. Justice and mercy are eternally one. Justice is benefi- cent and the retributive forces are redemptive. The cry to escape from the natural penalty of sin is the cry, not of the higher but of the lower nature ; the cry of a man who cares more for his own personal safety and comfort than he cares for the order and will of God. The man truly awakened and enlightened wants to be delivered from the power of evil affections and evil habits, to be saved from his infirmities and sins, even though it be by fire ; to be made right with God, right with men who are the children of God, and right with the whole order of things which is of God. Let us not be deceived. There is no other way by which 54 DE PROFUNDIS CLAMAVI a man can be saved from sin except by ceasing to be a sinner. Men not even decently moral are often heard rejoicing in salvation on the ground of certain beliefs or emotional experiences ; but they are hardly in the way of being saved — only inflated with a vain and foolish confidence. Let us not even dare to speak of being saved if we are still the willing victims of bad passions and tempers, of corrupt desires, of inordinate affections, of mean prejudices and false judgments. Let us not dare to speak of being saved if we are not being saved from the sins we are tempted to commit daily and hourly, 3. But thirdly, while it is much to be delivered from perverted and corrupt affection and to have the power of evil habit broken, yet much more remains to be done to have the fulness of the blessing which the gospel of Jesus Christ calls " salvation." Salvation is not only deliverance from sin ; it is growth in all true- ness and goodness of life. Christian character is not an incident, a result, a test of salvation — it is salvation. Salvation is character. The perfection of character and the work of salvation include the training of every power and affection to the standard of the perfect man ; the rising up on all sides of our being and life to Him who is the head. We speak glibly enough at times about saving souls — but what is the soul but the true and complete self-hood, the living man in his entirety ? To save the soul is to save the man in every faculty of WHAT MUST I DO TO BE SAVED ? SS his complex being and in every relation and province of his many-sided life. The saved man is the whole man ; the healthy and fully-developed man, man at his highest and best. Salvation is not summed up in the word " culture," but it includes all the good things for which the word stands. It is not a partiality or limita- tion, the saving of fractions of ourselves and fractions of our life — it is identical with the highest and widest culture, with the freest and fullest growth of man ; bidding us strive, and moving us to strive, after all things pure and good and lovely, and enabling us to attain them. The work of salvation is meant to be not so much a work by itself as a work large enough to take in every other work — the work of life. It is also a work that is never finished. The saved man will ever be getting more salvation, adding virtue to virtue and grace to grace ; going on from strength to strength and from glory to glory. Here, again, let us not be deceived. Unless the character through all its feebleness and failure is tending toward the Christian completeness it is not in the line of the Christian salvation. We were made and meant to be men after Jesus Christ's type — of the same mind and spirit, character and life, and to be content with no growth and no attainment which fall short of that moral and spiritual splendour — of that divine loveliness. 4. But, fourthly, salvation is not something wrought S6 DE PROFUNDIS CLAMAVI in and for ourselves alone ; it means a life lived not for self, but for God and mankind — it means not only character but service. It is in the teaching of our Lord Himself we have His large conception of salvation. The name He gives it is the Kingdom of God. To be saved is to be in the Kingdom of God. Now a kingdom is a society. About any merely private salvation that ended in one's self Jesus Christ had very little to say but this : He that saveth himself shall lose himself. He always put God — God's will, God's work, and the service of God in mankind — where much religion that calls itself by His name puts self — self-interest, personal safety, comfort, peace, and final bliss. To be self-centred is in Christ's judgment to be in a state of condemnation, not of salvation — to be dead, not alive. A man who only wishes to save himself has not learned the alphabet of Christianity — has hardly taken the first step in the Christian life. Any amount of care for one's self rightly and nobly directed, any amount of self-discipline and self-culture, is praiseworthy, but not if it is for a merely private and selfish end. Religious selfishness is just as bad as any other kind of selfishness. The selfishness which would find happi- ness after death just as it eagerly seeks for happiness before death, which seeks heaven just as it grasps earth, is but the old spirit of darkness transformed into the outward semblance of an angel of light. " Is WHAT MUST I DO TO BE SAVED ? 57 selfishness for time a sin — stretched out into eternity celestial prudence ? " St. Bernard, describing the various degrees of Chris- tian perfection, says that the highest is reached when a man cares for himself for the sake of God — for the sake of being better able to do the will and to work the work of God. Salvation, it is true, means the forgive- ness of personal sins, deliverance from personal weak- ness, defection, and corruption, the growth and culture of the personal life ; but all this not primarily and supremely for the sake of our private well-being, comfort, and blessedness here and hereafter — but for the sake of God and mankind. Let us lay it well to heart that man's chief end is not to save himself, but to glorify God ; to save himself that he may glorify God, live for ideal and Divine ends, enter* into fellowship with the Eternal power and purpose, and give himself, as Jesus Christ did, for the world's redemption. Vain, indeed, O man, is it to boast that you are saved while your brethren are at a disadvantage in the struggle for existence and in the attainment of good ; vain to boast that you are saved while your business life, professional life, social and public life are full of all manner of injustice and wrong, of unbrotherliness and ungodliness. Saved ! — while you live what on the whole is a self-seeking life. Saved ! — while society is unsaved. We are not solitary units — our life is bound up with that of our fellows. The salvation of all is 58 DE PROFUNDIS CLAMAVl necessary to the salvation of each ; and the salvation of each to the salvation of all. This private isolated idea of salvation is selfish, unspiritual, inhumane, unchristian. The salvation of Christ is essentially a social salvation. The less we think of ourselves in a separate way, as isolated from our fellows ; the more we give ourselves to helping our brethren, to the good of our kind, to the large interests of the world, the more do we hasten that salvation in which all are sharers, the more do we truly save ourselves — find, that is, through the Christian self-surrender, through the Christian enthusiasm for truth and justice and right and good, for God and all God's children — that which we seem to cast away : a deeper, richer, more powerful, more commanding personal life, — the free full life of the sons of God. II. We come now to consider how believing in Jesus Christ enables a man to realise the ideal of salvation we have been considering. A gospel to be a gospel must be a real and complete answer to the cry which in some form or other arises from the deep heart of every man when once he becomes truly awake and alive to his most serious needs. If we have no answer to this cry in all the stages of its development, then, however wise and beautiful our word may be, and however pleasing to the righteous who need no repentance, we have assuredly no gospel for a sinful, dissatisfied, aspiring, growing humanity. Can Jesus Christ save us, the men and women of WHAT MUST I DO TO BE SAVED ? 59 this twentieth century ? What is it in Him or pro- ceeding from Him that saves ? How does He save ? These are questions that perpetually recur with fresh interest and which require to be answered anew for every generation. Now, whatever error or superstition has clouded the image of Christ in the minds of men, one conception has always in some form been held — the conception of Christ as Saviour. Obscured, disguised, perverted as it has been, we find it through all the ages of Christian history. St. Paul called the gospel of Jesus Christ " the power of God unto salvation." Wherever it was truly believed it lifted men into salvation, lifted them from darkness to light, from death to life, from light to more light, and from life to more life. It both quickened and pacified the conscience, changed character, and brought men to fulfil the highest ends of human existence. Jesus Christ saved that old world into which He came nineteen hundred years ago — saved it when it was perishing through the fury of its passions and the weariness of its lusts, saved it by the new faith, the new hope, the new affection, the new spirit which He quickened and inspired. To the influences which He brought to bear upon the higher life of mankind, to the saving influence which flowed from His person and teaching. His life and cross, may be traced almost every point of contrast between ancient and modern history. And from the first days until now men who have come under the influence of Jesus Christ and been 6o DE PROFUNDIS CLAMAVI moved and mastered, inspired and led by Him, have been saved with a great salvation. But what must we do to be saved ? Appeals to what has been already done are never quite satisfactory as an answer to present needs. To-day we need a Saviour. To-day, deep in our hearts, there is the sense that of all evils sin is the worst, that it is, indeed, the only real evil, and that salvation from sin is the only issue that can make life a noble progress and a victory. Everywhere in our human world, and under all varieties of condition, culture and character, there is one great longing and aspiration, though it may find utterance in a thousand different forms : Who will deliver me from the body of this death ? Who will deliver me from the oppres- sion of shameful and bitter memories ^ Who will deliver me from the dominion of selfish passions and inclinations, of wrong ways of thinking and feeling, willing and acting .'' Who will quicken and inspire my life with those new and nobler affections which alone can save life from the tragedy of moral degradation and decay .'' Who will restore me to God, to myself, to my fellows, and bring me to that perfection and peace of life which come from harmony with the Divine will } I thank God, through Jesus Christ our Lord. Jesus Christ has done all this for men and can still do it. Through Him flowed, and flows, the saving power of God, which, drawing the heart from self to God and fellow-man, giveth us the victory over sin. WHAT MUST I DO TO BE SAVED? 6i He is still mighty to save — mighty to quicken and inspire the personal soul and to redeem society. But He saves not by one method alone, but by what- ever He was and is, did and does, mediately and immediately ; saves by all the influences of His life and death, of His truth and spirit ; saves not by any arbitrary and magical efficacy, but precisely to that extent in which He is known and understood, loved and obeyed ; saves by his revelation of the Eternal love and sympathy and sacrifice and by bringing us into direct communion with God, as children with father ; saves by implanting in the soil of our hearts new trusts and new hopes ; saves by inspiring true thoughts, true feelings, and those divine affections and motives which are the sources of all human excellence. The answer which St. Paul gave to the question, " What must I do to be saved ? " is an all-sufficient answer, if it be read, not as a single and unconnected sentence, but in the light of the commentary upon it which the apostle gives in his letters. In nothing have men done greater injustice to the Scriptures than by quoting isolated words and texts. If we cannot with open minds and hearts study the Christian teaching as a whole, particular texts are almost always sure to confuse and mislead us. " Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ " is not a little word denoting a little thing. It is a word of wide and profound significance. It is the symbol of an infinite 62 DE PROFUNDIS CLAMAVI idea — an idea of which the whole New Testament may- be said to be the expansion and interpretation. At the beginning of the Christian Hfe, and to the soul spending itself on questions as to personal safety and peace, it means something very simple ; but its fulfilment covers more than we think or can think, more than the most faithful can realise in a long lifetime. I know what it may be made to mean to a human soul weak and ignorant — full of selfish fears and anxieties about God and a hereafter ; to a poor bewildered creature without any fine desires and aspirations, trembling between life and death. In the hour of the final conflict and passion the most foolish and feeble and sinful man can so believe in Jesus Christ as the revelation and assurance of the mercy of God as to be saved from tormenting fears and be able to die in peace. To believe in Christ is indeed a saving faith when it helps one to believe in the forgiving love of God, to realise the Eternal mercy in the hour and power of doubt and despair. The religion of fear, though it is fast losing its hold on minds truly thought- ful and Christian, yet represents a stage of religious growth — a stage which must be passed through by all those who are being brought up, as many of us were brought up, under forms of belief which make men especially anxious about themselves, as if their own private safety and blessedness, and not doing the will of God, were the chief end of existence. It is well, WHAT MUST I DO TO BE SAVED ? 63 therefore, from time to time to meet its questions, for the highest life is not possible until men are delivered from selfish fears and anxieties. It is also one of the divinest offices of true religion to deliver men and women from this pious selfishness, to lead them away from thinking and brooding over themselves and their destiny to such a sense of the Eternal goodness and mercy as shall drive these questionings and cares right out of the mind. No longer anxious about their own safety, because they have learned from Jesus Christ that God is their Father and Saviour in this and in all the worlds, and that they may trust Him for life and death and the long hereafter, they will be anxious only to do His will and to be active sharers in that Divine and unending sacrifice by which the world is being redeemed from its evil. Then, further, there are in the New Testament a few great sayings which speak of believing in Jesus Christ as if it were the loftiest elevation to which a human soul could rise, the nearest approach to God and perfection. " This is the work of God " — that is, the divinest thing you can do — " that ye believe on Him whom God hath sent " : these words are true, not in some mystical theological sense, but as a simple matter of practical experience. It is the meaning of several sayings of Jesus to be found in the Fourth Gospel, that there is a certain believing in the Son which is impossible without a previous believing in the Father — 64 DE PROFUNDIS CLAMAVl that is, without a certain previous development and atti- tude of the soul toward God in expectation, insight and obedience — a believing which corresponds to a high order of spiritual needs and aspirations. The religion of Christ is not the root but the flower of religion ; it comes not first but last : it is the Divine fulfilment and realisation of the growing needs and aspirations of humanity. " Ye believe in God, believe also in Me." " Every man that hath heard and learned of My Father Cometh unto Me." " Unto you who believe Christ is precious." " He that believeth on the Son of God," says St. John, "hath eternal life" — that is, the highest and divinest quality of life — a believing plainly that is identical with the reception of the filial spirit of Christ, with loving what He loved, with living His life, with following in the steps of His obedience and service. And to men seeking that high and divine good we call " salvation," our Lord did not always say in so many words, " Believe on Me." He sometimes said, " Repent." Turn your whole mind and heart to God. He sometimes said, " Forgive, that you may be for- given." He sometimes said, " Obey," " Do the will " ; He sometimes said, " Follow Me " ; He sometimes said, " Endure unto the end " ; He sometimes said, " Love Me and My' Father." But, righdy understood, the repentance, the change of mind, the trust, the obedience, the striving, the endurance, the forgiveness, WHAT MUST I DO TO BE SAVED ? 65 the love, the self-sacrifice, for which He called, are all forms and phases of believing on Him. St. Paul, also, who exhorted the frightened gaoler to " believe on the Lord Jesus Christ " in order to be saved, told the Philippians to work out their own salvation ; the Romans to " walk after the Spirit, not after the flesh " ; the Galatians to " live by the faith of the Son of God," as he himself was striving to do ; and the Colossians " to fill up that which is lacking of the sufferings of Christ " ; and all these great exhortations do but fill out and interpret the meaning, reveal the solemn infinite range and depth of this primary one, " Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and thou shalt be saved." It would also, I think, be found that the interroga- tion of Christian experience would be most favourable to a large and comprehensive interpretation of our text. The ways by which men are brought into filial intimacy with God, into the fellowship of sons, which is the distinctively Christian experience, are as many and various as are the ways of the Divine approach to men. The way of Christ is inclusive of all true ways to God. As I read the lives of " the saved," of all churches and ages, and study the expressions given by different minds to their spiritual experience, their record of the way in which they found peace, deliverance from sin, victory over weakness and the world, the life and blessedness of the faithful children of God, I am reminded of the 5 66 DE PROFUNDIS CLAMAVI seer's vision of the New Jerusalem which describes the pilgrims to the city of God as entering through twelve gates, on the north and the south, the east and the west sides of the city. I. To the soul seeking salvation from the shame and fear and guilt of sin we still say, as St. Paul said, " Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and thou shalt be saved." It is the meaning of the Christian revelation that God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself, that, being infinite in love and sympathy, He bears on His heart the sin and sorrow of mankind, and that Christ reveals Him bearing them — reveals the Eternal passion and sacrifice. How few believe in God in Christ with a real believing ! The average religious man is more pagan than Christian in his conception of God and His ways. He says he believes in the deity of Christ, but does he not miss altogether and fail to realise the vital spiritual truth of the doctrine when he thinks of the invisible God as having dispositions and intentions towards any of His creatures and children, many or few, that are not Christ-like ; when he thinks that God can be less or other than that which the Son reveals Him to be ; less than infinite in His compassion and helpfulness, other than the everlasting Father and Saviour of men ? " The love of God in Jesus Christ our Lord " is the very heart of the Christian Gospel. It is true that the presence and spirit of Christ in human WHAT MUST I DO TO BE SAVED ? 67 life quickens and deepens the sense of sin, but it is also true that in the circle of Christ's influence and fellowship the liveliest and deepest sense of sin can never lead to despair. The man who truly believes in Jesus Christ believes in redeeming mercy and grace ; believes that what Jesus was to sinful men and women in Judea and Galilee long ago, the Father of Christ is now and for ever to trembling human hearts in their guilty fear and shame. To believe in Jesus Christ is indeed a saving faith when it helps us to believe in God, to believe in the eternal goodness and grace, and thus to be delivered from the fear which weakens and the despair which kills. The familiar statement, " You have nothing to do, only to believe," is a confusing and misleading one, but it has this amount of truth underlying it, that we have nothing to do to move and win the pity and love and help of God. We may begin our Christian life with the assurance that God does love us ; that His attitude toward us now and for ever, in this age and world and in all the ages and worlds to come, is the forgiving, merciful, helpful, redeeming attitude. The certainty of the free, all-embracing, unchanging, unend- ing love of God ought to be one of our permanent possessions, the possession of every one who has been born into Christendom and has breathed from child- hood the atmosphere of the Christian faith and spirit ; a possession which no sense of unworthiness, no 68 DE PROFUNDIS CLAMAVI conscious want of goodness, no fall, and no failure ought to be able to take away from us. It is true that believing in the Divine love and mercy and sympathy does not undo what has been done, supply what has been omitted, bring back the yesterdays, restore the wasted substance, and obliterate all the issues of past transgressions ; but it does save us from weakening regrets and fears ; it takes the anguish and dread out of the soul ; it helps us to feel that we are recoverable ; it enables us to enter on the struggle to rise above the evil past and the evil self with confidence and courage — with the assurance that victory lies within our reach if at all costs we seek to win it. 2. To the soul seeking to be saved from the domin- ion of evil passions and habits still we say, as St. Paul said, " Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved." A corrupt affection is best mastered and displaced by the growth of a new and noble affection. We often, I am persuaded, fail to understand the great Christian things by viewing them too far apart from familiar everyday experience. We know that whatever good thing wins and rules the heart may, according to its measure, be a power of God unto salvation. A distinguished man once said that in early manhood he found deliverance from a guilty passion through a devoted attachment to a branch of science. The saving potency of a true and pure love for a good man or woman has never been without its witnesses. Let a WHAT MUST I DO TO BE SAVED ? 69 man's life be taken possession of by a great affection, and what will it not do for him ? — cleanse his unclean heart, calm and chasten his hot and eager desires, bind him over to rectitude and faithfulness, and ever urge and keep him to his best. And it is just in this way- Jesus Christ has been a Saviour to many in all lands and ages. The things named are not, of course, on the same level as the Christian attachment and loyalty, but they illustrate the same law — the redeeming energy of love — salvation through the quickening of a noble and commanding affection, love in the soul washing sin from the soul. Though the smallest pebble thrown into the air falls to the earth by precisely the same law which draws Jupiter through the infinite spaces of the sky, yet that is not to put the pebble on the same level as the planet. What is meant is that what wins the heart from false, selfish, bad ways is a saving power — saves men from sin and reconciles them to goodness — that is, to God. The great word of Christianity is Love. Its gateway out of the hell of evil passion is the power of the passion for Jesus Christ. To believe in Jesus Christ with a real believ- ing is to be filled with a passion for goodness ; and it is this passion, and not any theory or doctrine that may be associated with it, that subdues the selfish passions, strengthens the will, purifies the life and redeems from all evil. 3. To the soul seeking to be saved in the sense of 70 DE PROFUNDIS CLAMAVI realising the ideal perfection which a man may and can realise, we still say, as St. Paul said, " Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved." Jesus Christ is the revelation, not only of true God, but of true man — the realisation and revelation of the Divine ideal of our human righteousness and the manifestation of its possibility to our doubting souls. To believe in Him is to believe in ourselves. He is ourselves in prophecy and anticipation. To believe in Him is to see in His life a page only too brief of authentic human history, a real part of man's, life upon this earth, the type and promise of the perfection possible to every son of man. His righteousness is indeed our righteousness, our human righteousness, which we ought to seek and strive after, love and live. It cannot be imputed, but it may be imparted and won by our sympathy with it and our obedience. Character cannot be transferred any more than physical vigour or mental culture, but it may be acquired. Our personal loyalty is the cardinal and inexorable condition of attainment. Believing on Jesus Christ is not a substitute for personal obedience — it is motive and inspiration to personal obedience. It is vital with quickening power to make us obey as He obeyed, to be loyal to His spirit and law of life. Thus Christ is made unto us righteousness. And in our Christian loyalty also are all the elements required for the development of the most complete and finished type of human excellence — for the free and full develop- WHAT MUST I DO TO BE SAVED? 71 ment of the complete circle of our human powers, for the attainment of whatsoever things are true, venerable, just, pure, lovely, and gracious. Jesus Christ's Christi- anity has an essential affinity for what is best in life and character, and the men it creates are not fanatical, narrow, one-sided men — but symmetrical, many-sided, whole men. 4. To the man seeking to be saved from that which will not let him be a true member of the human family and a good brother to all his brethren, we say, as St. Paul said, " Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and thou shalt be saved, and thy house." To believe in Christ with a real believing is to be saved from selfishness, to be delivered from our ungodly and unbrotherly jealousies, hatreds, rivalries, and competitions ; it is to be brought out of the circle of selfish aims and interests and strivings into sympathy with God's wide world, and into communion with all mankind. The affections which Jesus Christ inspires are all opposed to the affections which isolate and divide. His spirit is a social spirit, drawing men together in mutual love and helpfulness, making each feel, " Who is weak or wronged and I am not weak and wronged ? " through individual energy and influence producing beneficent effects on the families and generations of men ; making possible and actual a heredity of Christian goodness, the salvation of human life on this earth from the evils which darken and oppress it, and that triumph of the 72 DE PROFUNDIS CLAMAVI Christian idea and order of human society which is the true second coming of Christ. Thus believing in Jesus Christ continuously exercised is indeed a saving faith, having its final issue and result in a great salvation, a salvation that comprehends the two lives and the two worlds in all their length and breadth. Through the power of such a real believing we must become like Him in whom we believe ; His trusts our trusts ; His purposes our purposes ; His ideals our ideals ; His spirit our spirit ; His char- acter our character ; His work our work ; His devotion to God and mankind the pattern and inspiration of our service and sacrifice. Let us now ask ourselves. Are we being saved .'' — are we seeking and realising the great salvation of Jesus Christ, beating down evil beneath our feet, rising out of weakness and selfishness and all un- loveliness of life toward the perfect man, giving our- selves more and more to the large and best interests of our fellows and the world, more and more filled with Christ's passion for the will of God and the service of mankind, with the spirit of His obedience and sacrifice and the charity of His cross ? What avails our knowledge of salvation and the way of salvation if we are still the slaves of evil desires and habits ; if we are still allowing a spirit which is the deadly foe of the Christian spirit to move and rule us ; if we are living self-centred, self-indulgent lives, and the Divine WHAT MUST I DO TO BE SAVED ? 73 Passion of the Cross for the redemption of the world has never been kindled in our hearts ? It is not by our theological opinions, but by our practical fidelity, Christ measures our attachment to Him. What does He care for a believing that bears no fruit unto godliness and brotherliness of life ? It is our moral and spiritual sympathy with Christ that saves, that changes us into the same image from glory to glory, and sends us out to carry on His saving work among our fellows. And how shall we escape if we neglect so great a salvation .'' Here, as everywhere else, we must suffer the penalty of our neglect. Thank God there is no escape — no escape from the Divine predestination to salvation ; but by our persistent neglect we are strengthening our baser nature and life, and making the work of our salvation harder and harder — dooming ourselves to be saved so as by fire. Let us be faithful, and thus avoid that only real and tragical failure in life which is to be ourselves failures. Let us be faithful — not content to be scarcely saved, but seeking and striving after the Christian completeness. Let us be faithful, so that when the evening shadows fall upon this troubled life we may each be able to say, " Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace, for mine eyes have seen thy salvation." \K^iUL^ w^L O^^u^- ^^ --^^ • if^^ THE SYMBOLISM OF THE CROSS "Jesus Christ and Him crucified." — i Cor. ii. 2. In almost every picture-gallery in Europe we see one subject represented in many diiFerent forms — the Crucifixion of Jesus Christ. The old painters seem never to have tired of it. And in many of their pictures we find standing or kneeling near the Cross, either as spectators or worshippers, men and women of later times. Among the Roman soldiers, the citizens of Jerusalem, the Jewish peasants, and the relatives and friends of the Crucified, we observe bishops and monks, saints and martyrs of the Middle Ages ; and even occasionally the background of the picture is not that of the Holy City, but of Rome or Florence, Siena or Assisi. It is the way which these old teachers of religious truth had of telling their fellows that the Cross is for all lands and times, and not only for the people who lived beneath Syrian skies in the first century of our era. In a million churches all over Western Christendom 74 THE SYMBOLISM OF THE CROSS 75 men and women gather every year in crowds to re-enact in memory the closing scenes of the life of our Lord. All the resources of dramatic symbolism, of music, and speech, and silence are used to impress the lessons which the Cross can teach. The good that is done by this annual commemoration need not, I think, be questioned. It is not wasted time, Mr. Ruskin once said, to submit ourselves to any influence which may bring upon us any noble feeling. It is to be regretted, rather, that these memorial days of Christ should not be more widely and intelligently observed, and that by so many they should be allowed to pass entirely unnoticed, save for holiday and amusement. It is not as ancient history, not as the record of vanished struggles and of sorrows long since comforted, we ought to read the story of the Passion and death of Jesus Christ ; but as a representation of things which in all their fundamental aspects are for ever true — a revelation of life, of man, and of God, which is the same to-day as yesterday. Not merely as fragmentary reminiscences of a few dim years passed long ago in Galilee and Judea on which we may exercise our critical ingenuity, ought the old, old story to appeal to you and to me, but as suggestion and symbol of universal Tact and truth, able to stir within our souls at each eventful epoch of our days a new power of life. The temptation in the wilderness, the vigil in Gethsemane, the betrayal, the denial, the public judgment and rejection, the failure 76 DE PROFUNDIS CLAMAVI and the triumph of the Cross — all these events ought to have for us an immortal significance, and not only, or even chiefly, because they concern the Jesus of history, but because they interpret and express with infinite depth and power experiences which on their moral or spiritual side belong to universal humanity. They have their ideal as well as their historical value. That, indeed, which makes the life of Jesus so inexhaustible in its freshness, so new and wonderful and helpful from age to age, is just the power which it possesses of illuminat- ing our own lives in all their deeper passages. He is ourselves in advance, our Representative. The scenes of His life — the closing scenes, in particular — only gain their highest meaning when they are translated into moral experiences, and we are able to say with St. Paul, whose source of inspiration was Christ after the Spirit : " I suffer, I die, I am buried, I rise, I reign with Him." In " The Secret," a fine but unfinished poem which seeks to represent Christianity as the flower and crown of all religion, Goethe draws a picture of man in his pilgrimage through the world in search of the highest good, coming at last to the Cross : " He sees, betokening hope and consolation To all mankind, the Sign upraisdd high : He sees the Cross, then lowers his veiled eyes ; He feels how great salvation thence proceedeth ; The faith of half a world glows in his heart once more." THE SYMBOLISM OF THE CROSS 77 In Christendom there is now, as there has always been, no spiritual attraction like the Cross. Not a few here and everywhere, who are proof against many other religious attractions, are drawn by this one. It touches them, some in one way, others in another way, each man according to his temperament, his character, his culture, his experience ; but it is only the man destitute of spiritual life, if such a one can be found, who can stand beneath the shadow of the Cross wholly unmoved. We may not make much of it as a visible and material sign in our churches and homes, by our waysides and on our mountain heights. Some things which our fathers thought and said about it we may not be able to think and say, but in discarding this or that use of it, or this or that interpretation of it, we are not of those who wish to make it of none effect. It is still our symbol. The secret of its power is not bound up with any ecclesiastical exposition of it. The men who find in ecclesiastical theory and myth little to attract and much to repel, but who still glory in the Cross and find the law and inspiration of their life in the faith and spirit of Him who consecrated it by His death, are in our day a multitude which no man can number. We must not be of that small company of unpoised, un- balanced minds, who are for ever tempted to belittle what has hitherto been belauded in ways unreal and extravagant. Let not the exaggerations of men, their dogmatism or their sentimentalism, cheat us for one 78 DE PROFUNDIS CLAMAVI moment into thinking that we do not revere the Cross, do not love it, and are not loyal to it. Let us do ourselves no such harm ! Let us not impoverish our spiritual life and the spiritual life of our churches by slighting this source of inspiration. The supreme office or service of the Cross is to quicken and nourish in the soul certain great emotions, affections and sympathies ; and if in the solitude and silence of our inner life, and in our associated life as congregations of Christ's flock, it is drawing and keeping us nearer to man and to God, then assuredly we are not among those who are making it of none effect. Of all symbols the Cross is not the property of a sect, the monopoly of a school, the badge of a party. It belongs to all as the loveliness of the world, as our great human affections and needs, as our sorrow and sin, belong to all. It belongs to all who feel and rejoice to feel the healing touch of Christ, to all to whom He is as dear as He was to the disciples, who, though they did not understand Him yet followed Him, as He was to the women who ministered to Him in Galilee, and as He was to the outcasts who fell in shame at His feet. It belongs to all who get from it comfort, rebuke, in- spiration, some help to holy living and dying. Alas ! that men should cover it with their infirmities even when gathering around it seeking salvation. Alas ! that at its very foot they should nurse bad tempers and confirm prejudices, and from behind it shoot forth THE SYMBOLISM OF THE CROSS 79 poisoned arrows — even false and bitter words against all who do not think of it as they do. Alas ! that it should ever have been used to keep alive in the world the same intolerance, the same meanness and wicked- ness, which crucified Jesus Christ. It was not differ- ences of conception and opinion, but self-indulgence and worldliness of life, which made St. Paul denounce many of the religionists of his day as enemies of the Cross of Christ. Not differing thought and theory, but subjection to the senses, slavery to appetite, bondage to worldly custom, moral unfaithfulness, spiritual in- difference, these are the things which in the present, as in the past, make of men and women the enemies of the Cross of Christ. The Cross of Christ does not live merely as ancient history, nor as the centre of an ecclesiastical drama, or of a theological system. It has a message — a real and living message — for us upon whom the ends of an age have come, as much as it had for the men who lived in the first Christian days. It only requires to be taken out of the atmosphere of the schools and sects, and to be brought back again into the midst of our human life, near to our human passion and need, for men to feel its wondrous charm and power. 8o DE PROFUNDIS CLAMAVI I. The Cross the Symbol of the Sorrow of THE World We may have wondered at times why one Son of man crowned with thorns and stretched out upon a Cross should have made such a deep impression on the heart of mankind : why, in a world where there are so many tears shed and so much blood, where thorns pierce so many foreheads, and the cross of anguish is so universal, that year after year for well-nigh nineteen centuries men and women have gathered around this one sufferer and wept over Him, as if the crown of thorns and the Cross were alone His. In a paper pub- lished in the interests of Labour, I read not long ago an article in which the writer said : " There was a time when in Lent I wept for the Crucified on Calvary ; now my Eternal Lent is for the miseries of man, and the suffering and crucifixion of all the best helpers and heroes of the world." There is much in the suggestion of that sentence which must appeal to us all. Again and again, in moments of deep feeling and clear vision, it must have appeared to us to be almost like an in- justice to the suffering human millions in every country and age, a slight on the immeasurable miseries and martyrdoms of humanity, to dwell so much on what happened to one Son of man long ago. Why just Jesus ? Why the Crucified of Calvary alone .'' Why should His Passion and Cross be so exalted and mag- THE SYMBOLISM OF THE CROSS 8i nified ? It must surely be because this Son of man comes to us in His suffering as the Representative of all the sons of men, because His sorrow has a universal significance, because His Cross is the centre and symbol, the illumination and consecration, of all our human crosses. Our Good Friday and Easter Meditations would indeed be vain thoughts were they occupied merely with remote things. It would be a waste of precious feeling to muse and weep over the ancient story of Jesus' woe and to linger before His Cross — unless that Cross has a universal significance, and unless by the contemplation of that sorrow we are made more alive to the pathos of life, taught and stirred to bear more bravely our own sorrows, and to cultivate a finer and wider sympathy with our afflicted human kind. We may be sure that He who identified Himself so closely and completely with suffering humanity in His native Galilee, and who said on His way to Calvary, " Daughters of Jerusalem, weep not for me, but weep for yourselves and your children," would not have us spend one thought or tear upon what He once endured, were we not brought by that meditation and discipline not only nearer to Himself, but nearer to men to-day in all their toils and tragedies and needs. To purify the emotions, it was said long ago, is the office of tragedy : to lift the spectator to such a high level that one will be ashamed to go home from the contemplation of such struggle and suffering to make 82 DE PROFUNDIS CLAMAVl much of his own little ailments and troubles. The tragedy of the Saviour's life to which Christendom, especially on Good Friday, directs its thought, is surely being used for its divinest work when it is used to arouse and deliver us from our selfishness, and to deepen our sympathy with the wrongs and sorrows and needs of living men. It is as the Representative of mankind Jesus hangs there upon J the Cross. The pathos of the sight is in its appeal to that which corre- sponds to it in universal human experience, in your life and mine, and in the life of the race. In some shape the Cross enters into every human life. Do what we may it cannot be escaped. Sorrow and pain pass no man by ; and no reasoning can argue them out of existence, or reduce our fight with disease and suffering to a phantom battle — an illusion of " mortal mind." Living in a world where the blows of mis- fortune are constantly falling ; where the ravages of suffering are nowhere long absent ; where every joy is every moment exposed to blight ; where development yields new pain ; where increasing knowledge, increas- ing refinement, increasing goodness and sympathy mean increasing sorrow, and men and women suffer, not for being worse, but for being better than their fellows, it is no wonder that the Cross appeals to human hearts everywhere as the symbol of human life, and holds us under the spell of a solemn fascination. Rejoice as we may, and as we ought to rejoice, in all that brightens THE SYMBOLISM OF THE CROSS 83 and sweetens life, yet the fellowship of suffering is wider and deeper than the fellowship of happiness. A German poet has said that the image of humanity, broken in all its limbs, transfixed in hands and feet and sorrowful unto death, has become distasteful to men ; but that can only be true of men in their light, careless, self-indulgent hours. In all our deeper ex- periences our feet tread the path that leads to Calvary, and we seek the Man of Sorrows acquainted with grief. Christianity has been called the worship of sorrow, /and there is much truth in the saying. It blesses those that mourn, and counts the sensitive and wounded heart of sympathy to be the divinest thing in man. It has not diminished the suffering in the world, but it has given it a new and nobler meaning, made it appear to be no longer God's wrath and curse, but God's love and blessing. It has altered its expression, changing it from selfish suffering into the suflFering which comes from aspiration and pity and growing sensibility to the wants and woes of the world. Our communion with Jesus Christ, if it is a real thing and not a pretence, means that our natures with all their susceptibilities and capacities and affections, and our lives in aU their relations and interests and cares, have been tuned to a higher note and brought into unison with a diviner idea, and therefore to the willing endurance of many a burden and battle and many a pain and pang unknown before. We cannot indeed imagine a Christian life at 84 DE PROFUNDIS CLAMAVI all without this underlying sensitiveness to the sorrow of the world. Let us lay well to heart, then, this first lesson of the Cross ; its revelation of the reality and power of suffer- ing, of sorrow bravely accepted, borne, and so borne that it becomes a means and moment of development — a Divine education. Though He were a Son yet learned He obedience by the things which He suffered. He did not suffer that we might not suffer, but rather that we might learn how to suffer. And did we but take to the inevitable ills of our days as He took to His, meet and bear them in His spirit, then would they lose their bitterness and sting ; evil would be the minister of good, our struggles would be a discipline of strength, our pain would quicken and refine our pity, our suffering be a bond of sympathy with suffer- ing everywhere, our sorrow a divine joy in the making, our cross the power of God unto salvation. II. The Cross the Symbol of the Sin OF the World We are accustomed to hear the crucifixion of Jesus Christ spoken of as the act of the human race, and as such in a very true sense it may be regarded. A mind prone to dwell on the mere accident and letter of things may say, " I had no part nor lot in it ; nor in any circumstances could I have shared in it, or con- THE SYMBOLISM OF THE CROSS 85 sented to it." That may be quite true ; yet we have that in us which did it ; not only that in us which admires and loves the character of the Crucified, or certain features of it, but that also which when left to itself takes sides against Christ, against the things for which He stood and for which He stands. Goethe once said, " I have never heard of any crime which I might not have committed." The crucifixion was the work of men, and we are men. In the little world of the human heart, your heart and mine, what contradictions we find, what capabilities for uncom- mitted sins, the very seed and substance of the evil which crucified the Son of God. In thinking from time to time of the great world- tragedy of the Divine death, we must not think of it as far away and strange — not as happening only in the Palestine of the first century — but as an actual horror in the England of to-day. The tragedy of the betrayal, the denial, the desertion, the rejection, we see constantly acted over and over again. In reading of Judas, and Peter, and Pilate, the Jewish priests and the Jewish mob, we are reading of ourselves. The dispositions and passions, the motives and interests which moved them and determined their conduct, have more or less a hold of us all, and in all the critical moments of life they are tempting us to follow their way and take their side. Our Lents, our Holy Weeks, our Easters, would indeed be times of solemn blessing did they but open our eyes 86 DE PROFUNDIS CLAMAVI to the present reality of what seems to have only an historical significance — to the continual betrayal, denial, desertion, rejection, crucifixion of the Son of God ; did they but strip the Passion and death of Christ of their antiquarian and merely theological aspects, and make us realise that so long as men and women have weak, selfish, worldly, corrupt hearts, the Cross and Passion cannot be confined to one land or century. We shrink back from Judas with abhorrence — but let us not put away from ourselves the thought that we may be guilty of a like treachery. A divided allegiance is itself a treachery. Does not the love of gain, or the love of place, or the love of comfort, often induce men here and now to betray truth, to betray love .'' We do not, as Ruskin once said, disbelieve our Christ — but we still sell Him. How we blame Peter for denying the best Friend a man ever had — how it fills us with a feeling of half-anger, half-pity, to see him turn coward and liar. And yet the denial of Christ is a very common form of sin. To deny what we know to be the highest, to live and act in another way in profession, and trade, and society, in Church and State, than the way which we know to be the best way, is to deny the real Christ. We talk cynically of the Jewish mob crying one day " Hosanna ! " and the next day " Crucify ! " but how often do we see the professed followers of Jesus Christ guilty of the same inconstancy ? — as if mere lip- THE SYMBOLISM OF THE CROSS 87 worship, idle holiday adorations, and the scattering of dead leaves and branches gathered from our theological gardens could take the place of that deeper and more practical loyalty for which our honest Lord and Master alone cares — the loyalty of the life to His Father's will and work. We condemn Pilate, hindered from doing what was right by a cowardly and criminal fear of jeopardising his own interests, and yet is not his conduct in essence just what people are guilty of every day ? Now, and for ever, the deadly record stands, repeated in thousands of churches, " Crucified under Pontius Pilate " ; but have we not that within us all which can do what Pilate did — sacrifice the highest and divinest things in order to please Caesar, to advance our prospects, or to keep our place in an exclusive society or a worldly church ? We wonder that the moral and religious people of Jerusalem did not lift up their voices against the cruci- fixion, and yet every day in every town and village of the land the Son of God is being crucified afresh — crucified by the selfishness which prefers private in- terest or domestic comfort to witnessing a good and brave confession for oppressed ideas, oppressed causes, oppressed men. Certain philosophers of Greece were accustomed to say that if virtue appeared on the earth clothed in her own native loveliness, all men would fall down and 88 DE PROFUNDIS CLAM AVI worship her. It is one thing, however, to love virtue in dreams and visions of the mind, in poetry and fiction, another thing to love her when she appears in our streets and market-places, in our synagogues and temples — rebuking our insincerities and falsehoods. We may admire and worship the virtue of dream and theory and yet cry out, " away, crucify ! " to the virtue of fact — to truth and goodness in the actual world of men. The Cross may then be used to-day as yesterday to produce conviction of sin ; to find out where we are in relation to those evil principles and passions which cruci- fied Jesus Christ. What was done by Judas and Peter, by Herod and Pilate, by the priests and rulers and the people of Jerusalem on that first Good Friday, ought to start the question in the minds of each one of us, " Lord, is it I } " God forbid there should come to us the terrible charge, " Thou art the man ! " thou art a Judas, a Peter, a Pilate, a betrayer, a denier, a crucifier of the Son of God. No ; this must never be. And yet we know full well that it is possible to be charmed by the poetry, the music, the sentiment of religion, to be deeply interested in speculative theories of the person and death of Christ, even to feel the profound pathos of the Cross, and yet to be in spirit and life the enemies of the Cruci- fied. Let us ever bring our emotions and moods to a practical test. Let us ever seek to nourish in ourselves and in others that love of the law and spirit and character of Christ, and of the things which were dearer to Him THE SYMBOLISM OF THE CROSS 89 than life, which sends a man out into the world to be faithful unto death, to follow the True, even though it be to his Calvary. III. The Cross the Symbol of Perfect Obedience In the Cross of Jesus Christ we see absolute self- consecration to God in life and in death ; the loftiest manifestation of the power of man to give himself to God which the world has ever seen. It embodies, it is true, no new principle, no principle which was not clearly illustrated in the years that led up to Calvary ; rather is it the fulfilment and crown of the whole movement of His life — of the one principle, the one law, the one purpose, the one great devotion which dominated His being and doing, all His rejoicing and suffering, all His living and dying. It was the glory of Jesus to obey ; apart from His Father, He had no desires, no purposes, no interests ; in the Father only did He live. This absolute dedication of Himself to God — this absolute identification of Himself with the will of God — a power no doubt which He gradually won and possessed in the silent years which lie behind His public career — gives us the key to the understanding of His influence and His place in history. Whatever prophecies there may have been of the Divine Sonship of humanity in the experience of men, it came forth into clear and complete consciousness for the first time in 90 DE PROFUNDIS CLAMAVI Him who said, " I do always the things that please God." It is this perfect realisation of filial union with God that is the central fact of our religion. The divinity of Jesus is the divinity of Sonhood. It is the revelation of the Father in the Son. And the Cross is the proof and sign of His perfect obedience to His Father's will — obedience even unto death. His life was not taken from Him. In one wonderful saying — the strongest words surely which ever fell from human lips — He tells us that He laid His life down of Himself, that He had power to control its events and experiences, and was not the victim but the master of fate. He will not precipitate, but He will not avoid His destiny. " Master," said Peter, " that be far from Thee " ; but if Jesus had saved Himself — saved Himself by concessions to popular feeling and prejudice, and by avoiding the collisions which His devotion to the will of God made inevitable — He would not be the Christ we love to remember. From much reading of His story and meditating on His spirit, we have that idea of Him that it disturbs our sense of His dignity to suppose even for a moment that He could have yielded a little, compromised a little, and when His hour was come could have run away from his enemies or have hidden Himself. " If Thou be the Son of God, come \ down from the cross" ; but we feel that it is just because He is the Son of God that He cannot come down ; it is His filial faithfulness which led Him there THE SYMBOLISM OF THE CROSS 91 and which keeps Him there. If for nothing else but for its example of moveless fidelity, of obedience unto death, we need to place ourselves again and again under the inspiring influence of the Cross of Christ — an inspiration which nineteen centuries have not exhausted. In its light we see at once our defects and failures, our powers and possibilities — that which both shames and stimulates the work of our high calling — a glory of obedience and faithfulness which can be realised within the conditions of our common humanity. It is not easy to put all selfish and worldly temptations under our feet, to take and to keep high ground ; to say the true word and to do the true thing when it is terribly hard to do it ; when obedience and faithfulness mean loss and suflfering — a daily crucifying of the flesh with its affections and lusts ; but in every tempted moment we see Jesus — the type, the promise, the prophecy of that which we shall yet be, if we faint not. IV. The Cross the Symbol of Redemption THROUGH Sacrifice In the Cross of Jesus Christ we see the revelation and symbol of sacrifice as the law of redemption and progress — as the way of love and redemption always and everywhere. This part of its message to men has been and still is much misunderstood and misrepre- sented, but the abuse of a great truth is no reason for 92 DE PROFUNDIS CLAMAVI slighting that truth ; rather is it a reason all the more commanding for lifting that truth to grounds which are far above abuse and also far above the changing explanations of the shifting centuries of thought. The lifelong sacrifice of Jesus to the will and work of God and to the good of mankind, which culminated in His death, is both the type and the tide-mark of the perpetual and universal sacrifice through which the world and men rise ever upward to purer and more perfect life. It seems at times as though we failed to understand the highest things by seeking to understand them too far apart from our ordinary human experience. The Cross, as the revelation and symbol of redemption through sacrifice, needs to be brought back to our common life. So far as the principle is concerned, it is right to apply, and we do instinctively apply, all the New Testament phraseology of redemption to parents sacrificing themselves for the good of their children, to patriots suffering and dying for the sacred causes of justice and freedom, to the vast army of labourers who procure for us our necessities and luxuries at the cost of their nobler growth and comfort ; and when we do so all caricatures of the Sacrifice of the Cross and all parodies of the Christian redemption fall away, and we see that Jesus in His living and dying was fulfilling the law to which we owe all our best blessings, that the great fact of historical religion is the interpretation and THE SYMBOLISM OF THE CROSS 93 transfiguration of the inmost fact of life. Without shedding of blood — blood of body, blood of brain, blood of heart — there has been no remission of sins, no redemption from evil conditions, no progress from a lower to a higher state of society. Figuratively, if not literally, men have been crucified, their hands torn, their hearts pierced through with many sorrows, in the interest of every onward step and movement of mankind. It is by the way of the Cross light comes, freedom comes, growth comes, now as always. A modern writer in a volume of weird sketches tells the parable of an artist who painted a beautiful picture. / There was a wonderful glow upon it, which won thc^^' i admiration of all his compeers, but which none could imitate. They were eager to find out where he got his colours. They sought rare and rich pigments in far- ^oflF lands ; but when these touched the canvas their /richness faded and died. So the secret of the great / artist remained undiscovered. But one day they found him dead beside his picture, and when they came to strip him for his shroud they found a wound beneath his heart. It dawned upon them that he had painted his picture with his heart's blood. Yes ! The work which really helps the world — work of statesman and philan- thropist — work of poet and painter and doctor — work of teacher and preacher — is work into which men put their life, their heart's blood. It is this power to give without counting the cost to one's self, this power of 94 DE PROFUNDIS CLAMAVI suffering and sacrifice, which is the secret of all redeem- ing work. Putting away sin by the sacrifice of himself is what every truly Christian man here and everywhere is doing. The law of sacrifice, which is wrought into the constitution of the world, which was the law of Christ's whole life, and which was uplifted and glorified upon His Cross, is the law that is laid upon every one of us. It is not enough that Christ offered Himself upon the Cross of the world's salvation nineteen hundred years ago ; that sacrifice has to be prolonged and repeated in the lives of His disciples if the will of God is ever to be done on earth as it is in heaven. It can never cease to be offered until the world is redeemed from its evil and reconciled to the Divine order of our human life — the true atonement. f. In the sacristy of the Cathedral of Notre Dame in . Paris there is a memorial window to an archbishop who was killed in the discharge of his sacred duties amid the tumult of one of those revolutions of which Paris unhappily has witnessed so many. Beneath the window ^ the words are inscribed, " The Good Shepherd giveth his life for the sheep." The application of the text is a most legitimate and right worthy one. The ideal of the Good Shepherd is the ideal of all true and noble j leadership among men ; and obedience to its heavenly 1 vision is the sacrifice which God exacts as the price of \ all high and helpful service and influence. How does your work and mine look when judged by this test — THE SYMBOLISM OF THE CROSS 95 the Good Shepherd giveth His life for the sheep, giveth His life daily, hourly, year in and year out, puts all that He is and has into His work, and without reserve and without calculation spends Himself in it ? Can we, dare we, say with St. Paul, " I count not my own life dear to myself," " I die daily," " I am crucified with Christ " ? The Cross is the symbol of the life Jesus lived, and it must be the symbol of the life we are striving to live. Our work must have in it that same quality which makes the Cross divine. We must not preach self-sacrifice and practise self-indulgence. The fellowship of the Crucified is the fellowship of sacrifice, and the Church of Christ the sacred order of the Cross. Good is it from time to time to be reminded of this, good to listen to the message of the Cross, good to place ourselves at the side of Jesus Christ and Him crucified, and to hear Him saying to us — Brothers ! Sisters ! let us redeem the world together ; together let us bear its burdens ; together let us put away its sin by the sacrifice of ourselves. V. The Cross the Symbol of the Victory OF Failure It is with truth Pascal says that Jesus Christ " took the way of perishing according to human calculations." The Cross is the revelation and symbol of victory, but of victory in failure and because of failure. There 96 DE PROFUNDIS CLAMAVI never was such an apparent failure as the Crucifixion. Every form of evil seemed to have won a triumph on that first Good Friday. But things are not always what they appear to be. It was the saying of a high- minded man, who had striven in vain against an over- whelming majority in a clerical assembly, " When ye say all is over, then will be the time when all will begin." The Cross was not the end but the beginning — the beginning of victory — an endless victory to the cause of goodness in the world. Whatever else had failed, the loyalty of Jesus to the work of His life had not failed. The outward defeat was the proof of the moral victory. Had He been less faithful He would have escaped the Cross. There are successes which are sadder than any failures, and failures that are more glorious than any successes. It was by the way of the Cross Jesus went up to power and influence and glory — to the throne of human reverence and love. And somehow He knew and felt that He was to win by losing, to conquer by failing, to live by dying. And the history of all that is best on this earth is one con- tinuous illustration of this law of the Cross. Let us not be afraid of those noble failures out of which have come all the great triumphs of the world. Let God's great cause be dearer to us than any personal or sectarian success. The lives of not a few of the great religious leaders of the last century seemed more or less a failure — Robertson's, Maurice's, Colenso's — but they are THE SYMBOLISM OF THE CROSS 97 having now a second and a better life — the victory which comes of the apparent defeat and because of it. Because they were obedient unto death God hath highly exalted them. The path to real power still lies by way of the Cross. Let us, when we are tempted to measure our work by poor, vulgar, earthly standards, recall " the unfinished life that rules the world," that broken body hanging on a Roman cross, and the desponding cry of the disciples : " We thought that it was He who would have redeemed Israel ! " Edward Irving, when he commenced his ministry in the city of Glasgow well- nigh ninety years ago, resolved that he would " demon- strate a higher style of Christianity — something more magnanimous, more heroical than this age is accustomed to." A higher style of Christianity is more than ever our need. Let us attempt it. Let us give ourselves to it. Let it not seem beyond possibility — too great to hope, too difficult to dare. Let courage rise with danger — the courage that will welcome a noble failure rather than be content with a cheap, an easy, a mean success. " All through life I see a Cross Where sons of God yield up their breath ; There is no gain except by loss. There is no life except through death ; Nor glory but in bearing shame. Nor justice but in taking blame ; And that Eternal Passion saith — Be emptied of glory and right and name." 98 DE PROFUNDIS CLAMAVI VI. The Cross the Symbol of the Passion of God. In one of the ancient churches of Central Italy there is a unique representation of the Crucifixion. Behind the Christ on the Cross we catch a dim vision of the Eternal Father ; the hands of the Father behind the hands of the Son, and the nails which pierce the Son piercing the Father also. We shrink from it at first as coarse and rude, but as we think about it we feel that it is the old painter saying in the only language which he could command what has been so long and strangely forgotten, if not in form yet in reality, that God is in Christ, that the Father is in the Son, that His love had not to be won by sacrifice, that it is His love which is embodied in the sacrifice, that the Cross and Passion are the revelation in time and space, in visible and historical form, of the grief and pain of a God who suffers for and with His creation and His children. Little, no doubt, did the old Italian painter or the church of his age realise the full import of the symbol he used. Medieval theology was partly Christian truth and partly Pagan and Jewish superstition, and that is still true of much of our theology ; but truth is displacing supersti- tion, and the law of the Cross is being seen more and more clearly to be the law of love in heaven as on earth. It is difficult to account for the strange reluctance to associate the idea of suffering and sacrifice with God. THE SYMBOLISM OF THE CROSS 99 To be Infinite perfection, Infinite goodness and love, God cannot be a mere spectator of sorrow and sin. God and man live by one law. Every man that loveth is begotten of God and knoweth God. Creatorhood and suffering. Fatherhood and pain, love and cross- bearing, are joined together and cannot be put asunder. The Source of all feeling and compassion cannot Him- self be devoid of feeling and compassion. It is not a God callous as to suffering, careless as to sin, which the Bible, Old and New, reveals, but a God living in the life of the human race, afflicted in its affliction, and bruised and wounded by its iniquity. Everywhere the love of God is seen in suffering and sacrifice. The compassion of men is not the accusation of His good- ness, but the revelation and proof of it. The sorrows, the sacrifices, the martyrdoms of the world's helpers are His. The sacrifice of the Cross is not made to God ; it is made by God, it is part of the universal and perpetual sacrifice God is ever and everywhere making in order to take away the sorrow and sin of the world. What a Gospel the Cross preaches to men and women troubled by the woes of life ! Standing up against the dark sky it says that God suffers in and with His creatures and His children, that He is the Chief of sufferers, that it is His pity and love and sympathy we see in the pity and love and sympathy of Christ and of all Christ-like souls. What a Gospel the Cross preaches to men and loo DE PROFUNDIS CLAMAVI women troubled by the sense of sin and guilt, tormented by memories of passion and shame ! Knowing it to be a revelation of Divine sorrow and sacrifice, we cannot believe any longer that we have any Divine indifference or hostility to subdue — the notion of an angry God to be appeased by blood is abolished for ever. It reveals a love that seeks and saves to the uttermost — not a God from whom we have to be saved, but a God who is Himself our Saviour. Let not your sins, men and women, keep you from God ! You may begin a new life at once with the assurance that God loves you, that He has forgiven you, and that neither things present nor things to come will separate you from His love. Let us members of the Church of Christ gather again around the Cross of Christ and find, as we stand under its shadow, inspiration to live a life of love and sacrifice. Let us hear and obey its call to do what we see God in Christ is doing, to be His fellow-helpers and fellow-sufferers in bearing and taking away the sorrow and sin of the world. ^yuI